Future FRC Technologies?

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by lynca

A Backup Battery.
Supplies power to the cRio and Router as backup to the main battery. Less time lost in router or cRio reboot.

The VEX cortex has a backup 9V battery that behaves in a similar manner.

I'm not sure what problem that would fix anymore. We could get rid of the brownout conditions if we had one, but most radio and roborio reboots are from physical disconnections and which aren't immediately solved by a backup battery.

I do think backup batteries are a good idea because you could then switch out batteries during demos without needing to reboot the radio/RoboRIO.

Originally Posted by ASD20

I think the hardest problem is convincing teams to all scout in a similar way. Right now, every team scouts differently and collects different data, but for a system like this to work and be accurate, you would need multiple people per event collecting the same data set. I think a lot of teams will not like the data that the system would collect and will end up doing their own thing instead.

As far as ensuring accuracy, the thing with a similar problem that comes to mind is Waze and their crowdsourced road condition reporting. They also have a relatively small (I presume) amount of reports for each event and need to make sure they are as accurate as possible. I don't know exactly what their system is, but I think it would be a good starting point for anyone who is interested in making this happen. FRC has the advantage of being able to also reference the FIRST match API for some things (Ex: If someone reports that each robot on an alliance makes 5 high goals in a match and the API reports 7 total, you know something is wrong).

This system doesn't have to completely remove redundancy, in fact it works better when more teams are scouting. What this would do would allow teams to see real stats from events they aren't attending, as well as the general public.

This system wouldn't be comprehensive, teams are free to track whatever stats like personally but many of them could be added to the this central database. Largely teams track things such as high goals made the same way or at least can easily produce that stat for every robot they scout. There are other similar stats that most people agree on each year and if there are some less tracked stats, the system could show how many people/teams have submitted for that stat and possibly have some way to rank if you should trust that stat or not.