Robot Numbering, Attractive Solutions?

[GaryVoshol]

Unfortunately Siri, far too few teams will design a robot with obvious identification like your 3 examples. Over the past few years with bumper numbers, there were quite a few teams that could have been disqualified from participating because they didn't have readily legible numbers. Of course we don't want to toss them out of an event because they couldn't meet something relatively easy to achieve. But really, teams could try a whole lot harder.

Allowing teams to design their own number-display scheme would be just that much worse. Teams would choose to have designs that were clear to them, because they are used to seeing the logo, but which don't translate well when displayed on a robot. Or they would come up with a color scheme that didn't have enough contrast.

An example from outside robotics. In our travel soccer league, teams are required to have a light and dark jersey. One team used their light blue team color as their dark jersey, and white as the light. They'd go up to play against a team that used light and dark blue. Team A would have their light blue on as "dark", and Team B had their light blue jersey on as "light" - and you couldn't tell the difference between them so you had to get one of them to change. And was a girls team, so changing wasn't simple.

I'm sure we're going to have teams show up thiss year with a sheet of paper with a thin Sharpie number on them, teams with only 1 or 2 signs, teams with no margin around their numbers, teams with black on non-white backgrounds - all sorts of sub-standard number signs. But at least they can be readily fixed.