G10, The Dallas Disable & Crickets Chirping in Manchester

[Bryan Herbst]

The issue we ran into at Lake Superior is that often times teams don't want to turn on their robot until after they have finished getting out of their transport configuration, as working on the robot while it is on can present a safety issue.

However, what this means, is that we significantly increase the cycle time, because the flow for teams goes something like this and nothing can happen in parallel:

1. Get robot on the field
2. Exit transport configuration (up to 60 seconds)
3. Position robot in the correct location (we all know some teams can take a long time here)
4. Turn on robot and get back to driver station

G10 has been around for a while, primarily to minimize the effect of #3.
#4 can also be excruciatingly slow.

If we assume each of these tasks takes about a minute, that plus the match takes up pretty much the entirety of the 7 minute cycle, and we haven't even thought about any potential issues teams might have connecting to the field, the MC introducing teams, and the gap between the end of the match and the field going green.

The way we handled it at Lake Superior was that we pushed teams to turn their robots on as soon as (safely) possible. If I noticed that a team was on the field longer than their alliance partners, that is when I would glance at the clock and start watching them more closely. If a minute or so passed (I gave very lenient minutes) and they weren't off the field yet, I let them know it was time to start moving. We never called any G10s, and by eliminations every team had their system down to a workable time.