paper: Spanking the Children

[Christopher149]

I don't know if it's just me being annoyed, or if it's an actual problem, but:

At Escanaba this weekend, we were up one game in quarterfinals. However, our alliance was assessed a G28 tech foul for entering the frame perimeter, costing us the match 101-102. We then lost the third match for a variety of reasons. So, if the foul were anything less, we would have moved to semifinals. Also, about 50% of the other alliance's score was that one tech foul.

I know we don't want undue contact, but given the game, this will happen fairly frequently. I know, we even have quite a few scratches on the inside of our robot. But we have the vast majority of the robot hiding behind the bumpers, so there is very little to damage without really getting into the bot.

The loss was unfortunate, but it is what it is. However, the penalty value seems out-of-whack with the real severity of the problem. Also, the assessment of "intent" for G28 seems potentially arbitrary.

</rant over>

[KrazyCarl92]

This is a really nice summary of penalties in FRC for those of us who weren't around back when there were none.

Here's an idea of how the game could be better balanced. Change the values of the penalties to:
-10 Points for Foul
-20 Points for Tech Foul
-60 Points for Misconduct Foul

Misconduct Fouls would apply for intentional or extended (>10 sec.) possession of the opponents ball and contacting an opponent during auto while out of position (makes the opportunity costs/punishments sensible for strategies aimed at illegally blocking a 3-ball hot auto, such as 254's). Misconduct Fouls could also carry a yellow card with them if that would help deter these actions.

Unintentional possession of the opponents ball that lasts less than 10 seconds would be a Tech Foul, but only 20 points.

Everything else stays the same, just new point values for the Foul and Tech Foul.

Please GDC, change this.

[Sparky3D]

I understand why the technical fouls are so high this year, with only one game piece it would be easy to completely shut down an opposing alliance's scoring by just pinning the robot with the ball or stealing their ball. The problem I have is that fact that it seems like every infraction this year results in a technical foul and most of the time, a loss. Minor infractions that don't affect the flow of the match shouldn't be an automatic loss.

I really wish the GDC would go through and apply their standard "if you break rule X, foul. If rule X is broken repeatedly or deliberately, technical foul and possible red card" language to most of the penalties in this game. Then the ref's would have the option of calling a basic foul for all the penalties that really didn't have a noticeable impact on the other alliance.

[magnets]

My solution would be to drastically reduce the foul points for most fouls. If a team accidentally grabs an opponents ball, or momentarily breaks the plane of the low goal, the alliance wouldn't get destroyed. However, if the alliance were to do this again and again, or intentionally, then they could get bigger fouls.

[Caleb Sykes]

Does anyone have statistics on the proportion of technical fouls to regular fouls? If there are more technical fouls than regular fouls (which I would bet on), then the system is probably flawed, and some of the technical fouls should be reduced to regular fouls.

EDIT: I have answered my own question here.

[myork]

I grabbed the FRC-Spy data: about 10% of all matches are decided by fouls, but
Here's a breakdown by event:

[M. Lillis]

So you mentioned "bad design" of the human-player stations on the side of the field. I completely agree with you and I think that if there were a wall near the human player stations, it would solve the problem that FIRST states the (controversial and penalty prone) "safety-zone" tries to solve: safety.

This game is obviously defense-heavy, and there are the necessary ball-intake systems. I have yet to see an intake that does not go outside of the robot's frame perimeter. These two aspects do not play well together. A good driver can avoid most "out-of-safety-zone" penalties, but with ball collection near the side of the field, and then you mix some defense in, things can get hairy very fast.

When the human player inbounds the ball to the robot it is a very precise movement (I guess it depends on the strategy), because if the ball misses or bounces out of the recieving robot, it can roll very far away. Now, they return the ball to the human player in order to give that alliance the best control of their game piece as possible. Yes, the human player can make a better decision about ball placement (strategy-wise) than a volunteer or ref can, but it is not perfect. Human players are now forced to fear the inbounding of a ball. This either involves what our team dubbed, "the T-rex arms", or standing as far back from the field as possible (while still in the box) and lobbing the ball into the field. To get to the point; forcing the human player to fear the field and the ball slows the game down and does nothing to increase safety. (One could argue that it makes it less safe, because some teams tell their human players to keep their hands in their pockets to avoid 50pt penalties. How can you prepare for 3lb, 24in diameter balls moving at high speeds if your hands are in your pocket?)

To get to my suggested solution before this dissolves into a crazy rant: Install a short wall, say 3-4ft tall, that sits on the "safety-zone" tape marks. This wall would be a lexan sheet supported by a metal frame. It would do two things; prevent robots from putting extensions outside of the field (or out of the safety zone, whatever), and prevent the human players from accidentily putting their hands in the potentially harmful path of robots. The human player would still be able to inbound the ball by just rolling it over the top of the wall (which would be relatively easy for anyone over 4ft tall) I honestly think that a physical wall would serve a better function than an invisible plane marked by yellow gaffer's tape.

Just my $0.02
/end semi-rant

[Whippet]

Originally Posted by connor.worley

Wasn't there a discussion last year about teams intentionally breaking the rules because it would have been worth it, pointwise? I think it was concluded that a yellow card would go out for multiple intentional violations and the violating team would probably be ostracized.

Yeah, the issue was discussed here, but I'm not sure that anyone ever attempted it. If they had, they would have been inaugural members of my blacklist of FRC teams to avoid.

[Cash4587]

Well done. I hope the GDC reads this.

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

I don't really know how I feel about this paper.

The thing that sticks out most to me is that it seems like Jim thinks 2011, 2012, and 2013 are examples of how a FRC game SHOULD be designed, while personally I found two of those games to be some of my least favorite (2011 for the completely overpowered minibot, and 2012 because objectively defensive play was next to worthless). I enjoy sports that celebrate good, clean, physical contact, like a hockey check or a football tackle or even an outfielder dive or home-base collision (while they're still allowed to do that). The excessive amount of "Safe Zones" in these three games made any physicality almost moot, becoming a game of who-can-score-the-most (NBA basketball anyone?). Personally I missed the robot collisions and rigorous defense of old. I find this game a breath of fresh air in that aspect.

Regarding tech. penalties, 50pt opposing ball penalties make sense to me as stated earlier in this thread, given the ball's ability to be worth up to 40pts at any given time. You want to make committing the penalty always worse than the action it prevents.
But, I feel that a G40 should only be a regular foul. Keeping it a foul maintains the safety incentive, but 50pt is awfully excessive in the name of safety. G28 should also be regular fouls, especially in the case of a robot (say red) getting pushed into scoring the opposing alliance's ball (blue) into their own (blue) goal by the opposing (blue) alliance! I saw this happen multiple times at multiple events and it still doesn't quite make sense to me why it's worth so much.

And the last thing (that actually kind of bothered me), Jim's been doing this for so much longer than I have (only since 2006), so I know there must be something (multiple things) about it that keeps him coming back, but there was so much negativity in describing every pre-Logomotion game that it almost sounded to me like he hated the games before 2011. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

The thing that sticks out most to me is that it seems like Jim thinks 2011, 2012, and 2013 are examples of how a FRC game SHOULD be designed, while personally I found two of those games to be some of my least favorite (2011 for the completely overpowered minibot, and 2012 because objectively defensive play was next to worthless). I enjoy sports that celebrate good, clean, physical contact, like a hockey check or a football tackle or even an outfielder dive or home-base collision (while they're still allowed to do that). The excessive amount of "Safe Zones" in these three games made any physicality almost moot, becoming a game of who-can-score-the-most (NBA basketball anyone?). Personally I missed the robot collisions and rigorous defense of old. I find this game a breath of fresh air in that aspect.

Jim stated that he thinks FRC should be designed as a spectator sport. There's nothing exciting about 4 robot scrums in a corner of the field while everyone tries to acquire/keep teams from acquiring the sole game piece.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

I enjoy sports that celebrate good, clean, physical contact, like a hockey check or a football tackle or even an outfielder dive or home-base collision (while they're still allowed to do that). The excessive amount of "Safe Zones" in these three games made any physicality almost moot, becoming a game of who-can-score-the-most (NBA basketball anyone?). Personally I missed the robot collisions and rigorous defense of old. I find this game a breath of fresh air in that aspect.

The problem is that playing defense is significantly easier than accomplishing a game's scoring objectives.

If I want to defend, I need a good drivetrain, a good driver, and a robust machine.

If I want to score, I also need a good drivetrain, a good driver, and a robust machine (in order to survive the defense that will me played on me). And one or more game piece intaking/handling mechanisms, game piece scoring mechanisms, software and sensors to coordinate my mechanisms, an operator interface to control my mechanisms...

Hence, building an effective scoring robot is objectively more difficult than building an effective defensive robot. This means that there will generally be more effective defenders than effective scorers, in a rules vacuum. Games without rules to encourage scoring invariably turn into Battle Bots, where the victor is the last robot standing. As Jim explained, many early games suffered from this problem. A handful of games have instituted penalties and put the penalty risk on the scoring robot, which just tips the scales towards defense even more strongly.

Safe zones and other rules that put the penalty risk on the defender have evolved over the past few years as a way to tip the scales back towards a level playing field. Defense was still a huge part of the game in 2011-2013, but it revolved more around defending/hoarding game pieces than around smashing and pinning robots (though there were still plenty of big hits).

[Jim Zondag]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

I know there must be something (multiple things) about it that keeps him coming back, but there was so much negativity in describing every pre-Logomotion game that it almost sounded to me like he hated the games before 2011. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong.

You read this wrong, this paper is about penalties, not about robot games.
I always love many things about almost every robot game, but I usually dislike many things about the way that FIRST handles penalties. This paper is about the dislikes and is focused on the problem of the day.

What type of game teams prefer is up to them. FIRST tries to change it up every year to provide a new engineering game challenge. I will say that I could build one good robot to play defense, and then just redeploy the same basic thing year after year after year regardless of the game. Yawn. It's effectiveness would be limited by the allowable defense rules of the game each year, but it wouldn't require much in the way of new design or features each year, since defense rarely does. Contrast this with playing offense, where completely new and unique solutions are required each year and require major engineering effort to refine to world class functionality. If FIRST is about Engineering (and Dean seems to convey that it is), then rising to the annual challenge is a big part of what this sport is about.

[Dave Scheck]

Since Jim mentioned it, here's the match that we referred to as Wildstang Tetherball from 2004. We knew that the Martians were going to play violent D on us so we tried to hang, but didn't quite get up in time. They pushed us all over the place as we were trying to pull up and eventually the knot in the spectra cable that was in the hook pulled itself through the aluminum. The funny thing though was that they focused so much on beating us and 386 up that we were still able to score enough points to win the match.

[Chadfrom308]

Originally Posted by Jay Meldrum

Very interesting read. Cool to read some of the history behind the penalties in past FIRST games.

I would agree with you on the 50 point penalties this year. They pretty much end the match for any team that gets one.

In Waterford, we received 50 points due to the other alliance ingesting our ball. This happened when someone on our alliance was trying to pick up the ball and pushed into the opposing teams intake. The crowd was very upset when they were given this penalty because it was clear they did not try to intake the ball, it was pushed up into them, even though the team that pushed it into them was trying to pick it up themselves.

Though the rules are very clear on this; G12..."A BALL that becomes unintentionally lodged on a ROBOT will be considered POSSESSED by the ROBOT. It is important to design your ROBOT so that it is impossible to inadvertently or intentionally POSSESS an opponent’s BALL."

This does make a very difficult design constraint for teams.

This happened to us. We were lined up for a shot against the 1pt goal and the other alliance tried to hit/block us when there was a ball in between us and they ended up pushing our ball out of the robot and forcing (not on purpose or not even accidentally) their ball into our robot.

They said it was called because of our intake roller was on, even though it needed to be on to give us the best shot and keep our ball in.

They said to us exactly what the rules said.

Though the rules are very clear on this; G12..."A BALL that becomes unintentionally lodged on a ROBOT will be considered POSSESSED by the ROBOT. It is important to design your ROBOT so that it is impossible to inadvertently or intentionally POSSESS an opponent’s BALL."

But the problem with that is if you make it hard to take in the opponent's ball, you make it hard to take in your ball.

This was also the game decider for that match (which would've been awesome because it was against 67)