Future FRC Technologies?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Bkeeneykid

More automated scoring

This is less for teams use, but to stop the "Ref, I'm SURE I went over those ramparts! I swear!". This ties into your field view idea, which could help, but frankly, as much as we all love our local refs, no one is perfect. This of course depends on the game,too. A fully auto scored game would be useful, refs just to catch fouls.

Just as a note, the first time this was tried was '06. A number of mistakes later, the automatic scoring was backed up by human counting, and a pause was inserted between auto and teleop to allow a live double-check. In 2010 and 2012, the scoring was much more reliable and didn't need the double-check (other than maybe referees' gut sense); 2016 BOULDER scoring was fully automated. I want to say that '08 had automatic robot scoring. Come to think of it, 2010 had an automatically-applied penalty!

Now, that being said, all of those games had an element that the referees still had to check--with the exception of 2016, the robots' position at the end of the match was it. 2016 added in the robots' motion through certain areas...

And, just to elaborate on some of the mistakes in '06, most of them weren't necessarily the sensors' fault, but the field design caused some problems. Balls jamming on the low goal's corral and working up towards the sensor--and onto the sensor--could easily confuse it (15 balls scored when only 10 could have?), and the high goal that year had a tendency to jam.

Things have certainly gotten better, with more linear counting systems and better feeds to them, but there's still a ways to go.