What defines a field fault?

[Bob Steele]

Originally Posted by BethMo

We had a fascinating one in the finals of this year's Pacific Northwest District Championship. Here's my best recollection of what happened:

The defenses were set up incorrectly, and the field "pre-start" was initiated before it was noticed. They fixed the defenses, restarted everything, and ran the match. Team 1425's robot was immobile for most of the match, then ran into the wall until it was e-stopped (looked like it might have been running autonomous routine).

After the match ended, no score was announced, as the head referee, FTA, and table staff conclaved for a very long time (I believe it included a call back to FIRST headquarters). Then they announced the field fault. They said that it was known previously that 1425's robot needed to be tethered and re-initialized after a "pre-start" before it would respond properly to another "pre-start", and that the team had not been given a chance to do that. That made this a field fault.

The match was replayed, and this time 1983 (Skunkworks, the alliance captain) disconnected for half the match, so the outcome was the same.

The field fault match and the explanation for the replay don't seem to have been included in the Youtube playlist, so I wasn't able to double-check my memory. If anyone has more details, please add them!

(The alliance had already lost the first match playing two-on-three with the third robot undergoing repairs. An astounding run of misfortune... but 1983 still ended the event in the #1 position for the district. Hopefully they've now used up all their bad luck quota and everything will be great at St. Louis!)

This is a pretty accurate description of what happened. The only addition I would include is that in the last match 1425 also lost connection for a period of time so we were playing with only a single robot (2907)

I just want to say that the other alliance ( 360, 4469 and 3238) played a terrific finals and they were a very deserving winner!! Even if we had all of our robots playing we would have had a difficult time beating them.

Thanks for the good wishes!! Given that the only connection issues we have had in 75 matches so far this season were in the finals of a district and the District champs finals we also hope that our luck turns.