YMTC - No battery plugged-in

[Ian W.]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Hmmm. Im pretty sure the ref checks the lights on all the bots to make sure they are turned on - so if no battery was connected then you had two points of failure, the team and the ref

also you would get a 'no data radio' led on the OI - indicating something was wrong before the match started

so in this case, if the ref allowed the match to start with one bot OFF - and he did not come over and say "your bot is OFF do you really want to play that way" I would consider it a failure of the ref

same as if he said ThreeTwoOneGO! without first asking each team if they are ready.

In this case - redo the match - ref failed to ensure the starting contitions were met.

if the battery became unplugged 3 seconds into the match, thats a different story - in that case I would let the results stand.

Both things you mentioned happened to my team, two matches in a row (in quals, not elims, but it's the same rules on this issue).

The refs and the IFI guy are supposed to check that each team is powered up AND has a radio connection, the IFI guy has a laptop with special software that can check for the radio connections, so he'll check and make sure each team is working. This year they also setup the light to blink if there is a connection problem to the robot, but since this is new (or at least I don't remember it from last year) most drivers haven't gotten used to looking up to check for problems.

After the match where we didn't turn on our robot, I went to talk to the head ref and the IFI guy, and they said it was entirely my team's fault, that they had explained to us twice in driver meetings what to check for. But I saw them going over to other teams to alert them to problems, so I was kind of annoyed by this. Granted, we wound up being picked for an alliance anyways and becoming a regional finalist, but none of us saw that coming on Friday. Also, not to be harsh on either the head ref or the IFI guy at SBPLI, they both were very cool guys and answered many questions for me, the IFI guy even called up their software guy and let me speak to him to get some help on my dashboard program.

The match after that one we hit the diamond plate so hard in autonomous (I swear, I had it set to half power, and it still crossed the field in what seemed to be about 5 seconds) it knocked the battery out of the robot and disconnected it. However, since that was entirely my fault with setting the autonomous program's speed too high (I hadn't gotten a chance to test it, as I had written it Friday morning during the opening ceremony ;-)), I wasn't mad that the refs didn't call for a rematch.