Video Review Needs to Happen Now

[MrTechCenter]

Originally Posted by dradel

On the note of field automation, from what I have read here on cd the flags above the towers aren't even working at most events !

For a lot of regionals, they either didn't get the flags with the field road cases or the crew setting up the field decided not to put them up.

[nrgy_blast]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

From what I've read the main arguments against in-house video replay (no external video, that opens a can of worms) are cost, time and "this is the way it's always been done."

I look forward to proving all of these wrong when we run a pilot of this at the Gateway Robotics Challenge in October. Expect a whitepaper that addresses all of the previously mentioned concerns.

Remember everyone - tons of people said the district system would never work in FIRST. Did Michigan take no for an answer? Now districts are the main path forward for FRC. There are a million reasons to say no, I'm proposing a solution that makes it easy to say yes, let's try this.

I greatly look forward to seeing this report! I've been on both sides of the line (judge, head judge, mentor), and I have faith we can come up with some sort of review system to help eliminate the bulk of the most impactful wrong decisions. Limit to elims only, for example.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by BrennanB

However any other sport has matches longer than 2:15, or their season is more than what? 25 matches? Being generous here. Sooo 56 minutes of play time. Or like. One match of any other sport.

High school football seasons are typically shorter than 10 games (not counting playoffs). While a football game lasts 2-3 hours of time in an evening and 60 minutes of game clock, there's roughly only 11 minutes of actual gameplay in that span. Considering an individual athlete is (typically) only playing offense or defense (not both), cut that figure in half again. For football, we're getting into similar territories of playtime.

Plenty of other sports condense their competitions into short fire bursts. A cheerleading routine is only a few minutes long, and only done in competition a handful of times per season. Swim and track races have sprints that last under a minute (or just a matter of seconds). Shotput, javelin, long jump, and other individual track and field events are rather swift affairs for each athlete.

There are obviously some other sports with much longer match times (cross country) and higher rates of individual participation (basketball starts may play close to the entire game). But generalizing statements about playing time versus high school sports are going to have tons of exceptions. FRC certainly doesn't provide the best bang for the buck in terms of playing time, but it's more competitive than you may think.

[Boltman]

I go back to the idea a basic video of the game that anyone can take could be used for some end of day 1 RP issues and also any elimination issues (at some point after the game except in case of elimination w/l decisions). I don't want video to slow the game play down but I think there is a reasonable option that should be used for critical calls like losses in eliminations and first/second order ranking point issues...until FRC allows review though its the way it is.

CV seemed better than SD in terms of crossing accuracy except our first match where we had to go through portcullis (which is blatantly obvious ) six times each way, I heard our SF alliance petitioned a cross in CV elims too and were denied the points as well. we talked to the head ref in Qual 1 and made them aware ..it got better. We still won and got the 3RP

Here is FRC response...

"Thank you for writing and your suggestion. However, we have made the determination that any level of video review would open the door to extensive reviews, as every team at an event could have thought they saw something that caused them to miss an RP. To determine if something was indeed missed, out of fairness, it would require a review of all concerns.
Also, it might be helpful to think of this as a typical high school sports activity, in which video reviews are usually unavailable, and it is recognized that referees are human, and will occasionally miss something. While unfortunate, this is an accepted part of the experience.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions."

I see where they are coming from luckily from our perspective it dd not affect anything this season for us. We had great alliances each competition and a shot at it...which is all you can hope for anyhow.

[Jessi Kaestle]

Originally Posted by BrennanB

However any other sport has matches longer than 2:15, or their season is more than what? 25 matches? Being generous here. Sooo 56 minutes of play time. Or like. One match of any other sport.

Let's analyze football, on average the pads, helmet, and uniform cost $550 per student, which comes out to ~$25,000. Each coach is paid on average 20K-25K more than they would as just a teacher. Which conservatively comes out to ~$160,000/year. So without buying any equipment, just uniforms and coach salary, schools pay ~$185,000/year for 10 games (9 if you live in Kansas).

[Briansmithtown]

Originally Posted by patar8746

Well said. We all know no one will stand for those reasons when put the right way. FIRST is about more than the robot, its about inspiring students and always becoming better, whether it be robot capability, gracious professionalism, or running of the competition itself.





That to me is a lesson in just giving up. Do we want our future engineers to accept defeat when they fail? No, that is not a FIRST lesson. You wished you could show a video, what if you could? We identified a problem, and are working to solve it. Being the better man is not giving up, though solid GP for not getting mad, but while part of being the better man is accepting what you can't change, the other part that is just as important is working at the things you CAN. We can't change results from past regionals but we can do our part to stop it from happening again by implementing a review system. This was never about complaining about the past. Over time, things do get better, often teams get another shot, but there are plenty of Seniors that dont get another chance. You say it can't happen but don't say why. How about you help us try? I'd love to be proven wrong, but at least give it a chance.

See earlier posts concerning the time issues, and proposals have already been made regarding limiting challenges and I fully agree, though I'd like to allow teams to continue to challenge if they get the call right. Losing your ability to challenge for being wrong would be a HUGE incentive for teams to not overuse that option, eliminating time problems resulting from too many reviews.







Again, video replays would only be called upon in contested situations, and incentives can easily be provided to make sure this privilege is not abused (described above).

Also, whether you're for or against replays, I think we should all work together to test ideas at offseason events. How else can we say with any sort of confidence which option is better? Contact your local offseason coordinators to see how you can help get this together, I know I will.

It's not a lesson of giving up, it's a lesson knowing that you've been beaten. Would I have liked their to be a rematch for my last match? Sure. Would video helped? Definitely. Definitely after an extremely rough build season where teams most likely would've folded... And it was my last year too. You're not the first team to feel like there must be video review, and you won't be the last. It's something you have to deal with. And it wouldn't matter now anyway, because it's over, and here's no going back.

[dodar]

Originally Posted by Jessi Kaestle

Let's analyze football, on average the pads, helmet, and uniform cost $550 per student, which comes out to ~$25,000. Each coach is paid on average 20K-25K more than they would as just a teacher. Which conservatively comes out to ~$160,000/year. So without buying any equipment, just uniforms and coach salary, schools pay ~$185,000/year for 10 games (9 if you live in Kansas).

You must have a very rich school if that is true. And to my knowledge, the only football coaches that get paid are the head coaches and sometimes the assistant head coaches.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I'm contesting that the numerous cans of worms opened by video review aren't going to make things better.

Scenario A: The head referee makes what they thought was the correct call based on the evidence at the time, but later finds out the call was actually wrong. The call was match deciding and one alliance goes home denied of an event win.

Scenario B: The head referee makes what they think is the correct call. One alliance uses their once per elimination tournament challenge card requiring the head referee to look at the match with the captains from the alliance to explain his reason for the call. This also gives ample opportunity for the challenging alliance to provide specific rules or Q&A's to support their challenge. A match replay is issued if the head ref confirms & agree with the challenge's claims or the results stand as called if the head referee doesn't seem evidence to overturn the call.

There are definitely times where something like this could have came in handy. Look back to San Diego last year where the incorrect call was made and was admitted to be wrong once the Q&A was produced. Maybe having that challenge would have given them a moment to find the Q&A and take another look at the situation?

My point is it's worth taking a look at and talking about. This could give referees another tool to help them out when making very tough calls. Why wouldn't we want to help our referees out?

[Madison]

How can you review something for correctness when there's no record it happened?

[gblake]

Folks,

FRC/VRC/FTC/VIQ matches don't proceed in little increments the way many big league sports do (USA football downs, baseball batters & pitches, Cricket ___s, Tennis volleys) .

And, they don't have long stretches of continuous action like many other big league sports (Nascar, Soccer, Basketball or Hockey).

Because of the implications of those differences, I believe that as a practical matter, untangling the spaghetti of knock-on effects that many (most?) overturned calls would create, would be a nightmare of ambiguity.

Except for the last N seconds of a match (where N is very small), everything that affects the score has an effect on how teams and alliances play the games. Neither alliance could argue that an overturned call from early in a match doesn't effect both alliances. In those many cases, I think there would be little a ref could do other than throw their hands up and initiate a replay.

I believe that Video replay successes in big-league sports are unlikely to translate into FRC successes. I predict that if video replay in FRC is successful, it will be because an FRC method is created, not because a big-league method is copied. I also believe that a successful FRC method will be a purple squirrel for most, and the great white whale of some.

I'll look forward to hearing from folks who attempt to use video replays during the upcoming off-season, to see what effect these differences create between what folks are imagining, and what is actually going to occur. I'll bet a beverage that the gulf between ambition and accomplishment is pretty wide.

Unless/until we have some experimental results to digest, I think our current posts are only making 11-12 years of "rubble" bounce.

I'm willing to stop bouncing the rubble, and wait for the results.

Blake

[mhaeberli]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

It's not video review, but big props to 4342 did something very similar in 2014 at Chestnut Hill.

(balance snipped out).
Very cool! Great GP! And great courage!

[Foster]

I have to say I like Ryan Dognaux's plan to pilot this at an off-season event. I like the challenge rules (one per team, etc) that were presented in another post. I'm looking forward to seeing a series of threads on "How we did replays at XYZ event."

I'm also behind adding extra scorekeepers to the field crews to help stop some of the pain for upcoming events. It's possible that an extra set of eyes would cut the pain points way down.

In the past I've run very large VEX events. In most cases there are 2 refs watching the action on the fields. (Running two divisions at a time) Once elims start the refs double up and they pretty much get told watch a single robot's action. With a person focused on a robot it's hard to miss things. For example in VEX, the dreaded "pinning" is easier to manage since there is two refs watching (the robot doing the pinning and the robot being pinned each have a ref watching the action). Again, only for the eliminations, not possible for all matches.

I'm in a wait and see mode, happy to let Ryan and others pilot this out. Alpha test for Stronghold, beta for next year, to see how it flies.

[FlyingHedgeHog]

Originally Posted by BrennanB

However any other sport has matches longer than 2:15, or their season is more than what? 25 matches? Being generous here. Sooo 56 minutes of play time. Or like. One match of any other sport.

If anything this seems more like an arguement in favor of implementing districts than a replay system. With districts you get 2-3 events, with 12 matches at each.

[EmileH]

My take on this is that if FIRST were to make attempts to introduce a video review system, it would need to be piloted and slowly rolled out, like Districts, or webcasting. You can't just flip a switch and make it happen. After reading a lot of the comments in this thread, I will not be taking a dedicated stance on it since I share opinions from those on both sides of the fence. Yes, it is not OK to allow students to leave events disappointed and discouraged from their hard work because of a referee misstep - but as a soccer referee, I know what it's like to be on the other side. Learning to deal with disappointment and seeing what YOU can do to make YOUR robot better is a much better thing to get out of it than to get angry at the referees or get angry at FIRST.

If a system of video review were to be implemented, there would be several requirements and constraints that would need to be addressed.

1) It costs a lot of money to have the events record the matches. I don't know how many fields are circulating within FIRST, but a camera and recording system would need to be included with every field if this system were to be fully implemented. One way to solve the cost constraint is to get a camera company to sponsor FIRST, maybe GoPro, Samsung, or Sony, and they could work in collaboration with FIRST to supply, design, test and implement the system.

2) It delays matches and the flow of the event. I like the idea that was thrown out earlier of limiting the amount of video replays that one team can call. I would think that limiting it to 2 replays per elimination alliance is a fair number. Also to keep from delaying robot flow, you can limit the number of team members who may come to the question box to 1 or 2, such that the rest of the team can be removing the robot from the field. There's a reason you only have one timeout coupon in the eliminations. There's a reason that you only have one backup robot to call in - it just takes up too much time, and takes away from the appeal of the other teams and the visiting public, which at a certain point you must take into account.

3) There's not enough camera coverage. I don't think I've seen any FRC event this year that has less than 3 cameras covering the field on the webcast. If FIRST were to implement the system, it would need to have multiple camera angles aimed at the field - it is also possible to use the existing equipment that many events use to record their matches. These would be logistics that would need to be figured out in the pilot and testing period.

Not taking a stance, just providing solutions. If we decide against video review, what solutions will be provided to prevent referee mistakes?

[Tyler Olds]

We will be discussing this topic on FUN Recap tomorrow! Thank you to all who are passionate on both sides as we put together a story.