FRC Blogged - Practice Fields at Championship – We Hear You

[Hallry]

Taken from the FRC Blog, 4/22/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ip-we-hear-you

Practice Fields at Championship – We Hear You

Blog Date: Monday, April 22, 2013 - 13:02

We’re seeing lots of activity on the forums over our release of the Practice Field policy for Championship. I’m going to try to clarify some things, and let you know about changes we’re making.

Our primary concern with the practice fields is safety. With this year’s game, we feel that the only safe way to run the Formal Practice Fields, where robots may be driving and shooting over long distances and at high velocities, is with no humans on the field. The match play timing structure and use of FMS were a result of the desire to make sure that all robots are enabled and disabled in a controlled manner on these fields.

Another reason we want to use the FMS system on the Formal Practice Field is so we can uncover any issues during a match that doesn’t count towards team rankings. Our working assumption is that you would rather have something go wrong during a practice match than during one of your qualification matches. A typical complaint we’ve received this year is ‘It worked on the practice field, but not on the competition field.’ Our new approach gives us more of a chance to get to those problems. CSAs will be available in the pits to help you sort through these things. To provide additional assistance with software issues, ports for code download and debugging (including FTP) will be open on the Formal Practice Field FMS system.

As far as concerns that FMS will slow things down, it has been running very smoothly this season. Robots are connecting quickly, with very few issues. If you are in doubt, ask any FTA who has worked the field for the last few years.

Without having run Ultimate Ascent matches in this back-to-back fashion and without the scoring system, we can only estimate how long it will take to reset all the robots and start playing again. We felt it was best to be conservative about the amount of play time you will receive in the Practice Field Policy. As we better understand how long resetting these fields takes, we plan to adjust the number and/or timing of matches played within each time slot in order to maximize the play time that teams have on the Formal Practice Field. The Practice Field Policy has been updated to indicate that the two matches will be a minimum.

The Informal Practice Fields will include a pyramid, set at the competition-field distance from the disc goals. As noted in the write-up, they will be first-come, first served. We will have a volunteer present, to help with the belaying system. I count on everyone’s Gracious Professionalism in using this shared resource.

You can find the revision 2 of the Championship Practice Field Policy here: http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default...ice_Fields.pdf.



I’ll blog again soon.

Frank

[CalTran]

Well, they defend their choice well.

[MechEng83]

I don't think most of use have any problems with the decision once the explanation was laid out. It would have been nice to have the reasoning out there at the start, rather than let us stew for a week.

[Gregor]

Most of the complaints were about lack of reasoning. Now they provided reasoning. I like this Frank guy, he seems pretty cool.

[EricDrost]

Originally Posted by Gregor

I like this Frank guy, he seems pretty cool.

I just hope FIRST HQ knows how cool he is so we can keep him!

[rsisk]

Frank is frank, and I like that.

[ehochstein]

#ILikeFrank

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by Wiifi

#ILikeFrank

The post you are spotlighting already has spotlights. Please check the spotlight list to make sure your quote hasn't been suggested already. Thanks.

Darn, I got beat to it.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by CalTran

Darn, I got beat to it.

Sorry about that

[ErvinI]

• Humans may not throw DISCS. All discs should be entered through the Feeder Slot.

This should really be emphasized. I can see some human players be oblivious to this rule.

Not sure what to think about this new practice arrangement. I'm glad that there are still informal fields available, although I'm worried that if something goes awry in autonomous (which kind of happened at Buckeye on practice day!), I won't have the power to stop it like I could when running the robot on a regional practice field, stopping any damage to the robot. At the same time, it also means that only robots will be damaged by it.

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Gregor

I like this Frank guy, he seems pretty cool.

I had an opportunity to spend a few minutes with Frank at the MAR championship. He really is as nice as his blog posts, and he REALLY gets FRC. I think we should all write letters to first HQ and tell them how much we like this guy so we can keep him for a while.

[BrendanB]

Thank you Frank! The reasons listed above make total sense!

Glad to hear there will be pyramids available!