Can/should a drive team ask opposing drive team to change their uniform?

[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by FrankJ

As others have said, bring to the head referees attention. If the referee decided it was an issue, then GP would not enter into it.

Here in Southern California we had several teams whose Safety Captains wore reflective vests. The reflective tape pattern was similar to the target's. Two vertical stripes and one horizontal at the bottom. We asked them not to wear the vests near the field and especially not in the Player Station. Nobody had a problem when the reason was explained

[Steve2062]

Drive Coach for 2062 here,

As you noted, our drive team has been wearing the safety vests and hard hats since we started in 2007 and, to my knowledge, have never had any problems with other robots vision tracking. Because of this, we never even had a second thought that this year would be any different and played through our 2 regionals this year continuing to wear them. It has never been our intent to interfere with another team, just something our team does as part of our safety culture.

Had we been approached by the Head Ref or another team with an explanation, we would have taken our safety vests off or covered the reflective parts to remove the problem.

As it is, at Midwest we were concerned with the scrolling banner showing sponsor logos getting in the way of our vision tracking as it was popping up on our camera's during field calibration. We talked to the head ref about it and he said if it became an issue to let him know. Luckily, it didn't seem to impacted our shots at all.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Steve2062

Drive Coach for 2062 here,

As you noted, our drive team has been wearing the safety vests and hard hats since we started in 2007 and, to my knowledge, have never had any problems with other robots vision tracking. Because of this, we never even had a second thought that this year would be any different and played through our 2 regionals this year continuing to wear them. It has never been our intent to interfere with another team, just something our team does as part of our safety culture.

Had we been approached by the Head Ref or another team with an explanation, we would have taken our safety vests off or covered the reflective parts to remove the problem.

As it is, at Midwest we were concerned with the scrolling banner showing sponsor logos getting in the way of our vision tracking as it was popping up on our camera's during field calibration. We talked to the head ref about it and he said if it became an issue to let him know. Luckily, it didn't seem to impacted our shots at all.

Makes sense, has your vision ever been impeded by your own vests? If not then I don't SEE a problem.

[hardcopi]

This year vision has been so critical. We had one bot at LSSU that appeared to be shooting at a teams lit numbers during auto (in the stands) almost hit them too.

[EricH]

For those safety vests, it may be possible to wear them inside-out. That'd keep the reflective part pretty difficult to see.

[BethMo]

I've seen several robots (including ours, once!) take auto shots at the striped shirts of the referees.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Kenton,
I was not aware of the issue, please ask me next time. This is a question that the LRI, FTA and Head Ref should be made aware of. It seems that one of the issues that teams are experiencing is the wide angle fixed lenses of the cameras many teams use. We can talk this weekend, I am planning on coming by.
AL

[autox_vette]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Kenton,
I was not aware of the issue, please ask me next time. This is a question that the LRI, FTA and Head Ref should be made aware of. It seems that one of the issues that teams are experiencing is the wide angle fixed lenses of the cameras many teams use. We can talk this weekend, I am planning on coming by.
AL

Thanks Al. Unfortunately I wasn't aware of it until we were doing our post event analysis.

Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to place any blame or start a witch hunt for teams using safety vests with reflective decorations (I hope no-one took it as such).

I just wanted (and think we did successfully) to start a dialog to make teams with similar decorations and teams using vision tracking be aware that the shape of the vision targets this year is very similar to the shape of the decorations on some of these articles of clothing, and to establish the correct method of dealing with it if someone believed that they might be having an issue.

Thanks,