Concerns regarding the green paneling/green shirts

[Mike Schroeder]

Originally Posted by shotgunking777

hey what if you made a robot to throw out like a green flag into the field
ha think about that but don't steal it.....

well then you would be intentionally removing a part of your robot and that is illeagal in accordance of G24

Originally Posted by USFIRST.org

<G24> Robots may not intentionally detach parts, or leave multiple MECHANISMS on the field. Violations will

result in a 10 point penalty. If a detached COMPONENT or MECHANISM is attached to a goal and prevents

additional STACKING of TETRAS, the team will be disqualified.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Big Mike

well then you would be intentionally removing a part of your robot and that is illeagal in accordance of G24

A new thought. what if you slapped a panel on your robot that was mostly the same size and shape as the panel on a vision tetra? Then write some fast dead reckoning routines and see if you can occupy the possible position of an opponent's vision tetra in time to distract and confuse their vision system. If you can do this along with other useful things, it makes you a prime partner for a team that is already really good with the vision tetra.

[AnimatorSarah]

The only thing I could see maybe throwing that off is that there are so many dirrent spots the vision tetras could be in. It would seem you would almost have to program a Dead reckoning program for each position which are randomly selected.

I'd also be worried about if that would be concerned a knowledgeable effort to mess with the opposing robots autonomous mode.

But if this was legal all round I could see where this could be useful.

[the_undefined]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

A new thought. what if you slapped a panel on your robot that was mostly the same size and shape as the panel on a vision tetra? Then write some fast dead reckoning routines and see if you can occupy the possible position of an opponent's vision tetra in time to distract and confuse their vision system. If you can do this along with other useful things, it makes you a prime partner for a team that is already really good with the vision tetra.

R26 forbidds any additional parts that are intendet to interfer with any of the sensors or the vision system ...

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by the_undefined

R26 forbidds any additional parts that are intendet to interfer with any of the sensors or the vision system ...

As quoted above, R26 forbids you from jamming or interfering with the vision system. a green panel would just distract the robot's program. the camera would be working perfectly, just looking at the wrong thing. If you could pull it off quick enough you'd have a 33% chance of confusing your opponent. This is assuming you have a good alliance that doesn't need your help elsewhere during autonomous.

[shotgunking777]

Originally Posted by shotgunking777

hey what if you made a robot to throw out like a green flag into the field
ha think about that but don't steal it.....

well okay and if they doesn't work just make like a flag or somthing that will fly up but still a part of your robot.

[Swan217]

Originally Posted by shotgunking777

well okay and if they doesn't work just make like a flag or somthing that will fly up but still a part of your robot.

Look, guys - It comes down to one thing: Gracious Professionalism and INTENT of the rules. (OK, that's two things)

The INTENT is that your team should not INTENTIONALLY screw around with other teams' vision sensors. Having a flag or something the exact same color as the vision tetras to INTENTIONALLY distract another robot may or may not be against the rules, but it is probably not GP.

On the other hand, having your robot being your team colors would definitely not be against the rules, and may or may not be GP, depending on what your motivation is. But like Dave said, it's probably not a smart thing to do if your alliance relies on getting the vision tetras and goes after your robot instead.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Dan Swando

Look, guys - It comes down to one thing: Gracious Professionalism and INTENT of the rules. (OK, that's two things)

The INTENT is that your team should not INTENTIONALLY screw around with other teams' vision sensors. Having a flag or something the exact same color as the vision tetras to INTENTIONALLY distract another robot may or may not be against the rules, but it is DEFINITELY not GP.

On the other hand, having your robot being your team colors would definitely not be against the rules, and may or may not be GP, depending on what your motivation is. But like Dave said, it's probably not a smart thing to do if your alliance relies on getting the vision tetras and goes after your robot instead.

GP can mean a lot of things. I'm reading the rule as not overloading the other team's camera with changing colors etc. So much so that it can no longer operate effectively. A Green decoy panel is just giving the camera something else to look at. The primary difference being that a decoy panel could potentially be programmed around. A jammed overloaded camera can't be programmed around.

As far as GP... there's lots of things that would be not GP if interfering with another team's autonomous mode is unGP. You couldn't bump them or get in their way or anything. The teams last year that tore out of the starting gate to put a goal in the way of the other robot were being unGP as well then.

[techtiger1]

Does anyone know the range of the cmu2cam. How far can it see ? any answers would be greatly appricated thanks.

[PCA]

Rust-Oleum Fluorescent Green is the color being used on the plywood sides of the green vision tetras. There is a built in function in the camera that automatically attempts to adjust contrast and brightness until it has roughly equalized it (meaning about 50% of the pixels the camera is reading fall on one side of the spectrum, and 50% fall on the other). The good thing about this is that it permits colors to be recognized more accurately and consistently overall but the bad thing is that there aren't too many shades of brightness and contrast between MOE Green and the Rust-Oleum Fluorescent Green. Fortunately I think the RGB is different enough to maybe differentiate us from it, not that I particularly think the RGB has to be different at all, as I will explain later.

Here is the Rust-Oleum green indicated:
http://www.rustoleum.com/Product.asp...ct_id=37&SBL=1
Here is MOE Green: (Just check out the text/pictures)
http://www.moe365.org/

As Dave commented, there are many ways to avoid having your robot track another robot in autonomous. The camera draws the smallest possible square around any patch of the color it's looking for. It then reports the 4 coordinates to you. If you find the area of the square (not hard) you will be able to tell the relative size of the object you're looking at. Because it reports the coordinates instead of just the size of the picture it is also possible to tell the height of the object you're looking at, depending on how you mount your camera. The third way would be to limit the movement of your robot to your half of the field or to the vision tetra positions (harder to implement than to say, but possible). For something else to be the same size, height, color, and in about the same place as the tetra's panel it pretty much has to be intentional, even for we teams who are natural greens.

In regards to strategically painting your robot green. I do not foresee any physical damage coming to your robot from this because no one will be moving that fast if they're using the camera alone to guide them. Do not take this to mean that you can go on an intentionally distracting path in autonomous mode and expect to come out fine. I suspect that many people will not be using this camera at all and will, instead, be running their side of the field around at relatively high speeds in autonomous modes. If you got close enough to a side that your robot was relatively the size of a vision Tetra to an opponent looking with the camera then you'd probably be in the path of someone running around. There would be a big boom and you would feel silly because not only your distraction didn't work, but also your robot got broken before driver mode even started.

So few people are going to end up using the camera, which will required a phenomenal amount of debugging, that building a robot with the intent of distracting the tetra-tracking robots would be an ultimately unsuccessful strategy. If you did not build a robot specifically designed to distract other robots then it would probably be unable to take the abuse of the circuit riders.

Not to mention that intentionally distracting the camera is illegal via R26 and completely against the spirit of gracious professionalism.

PS. All of the information that I posted in this post is included and easily accessible in your Camera manual pdfs. If you want to know more go look it up. They do not list a specific focal length in any of the documentation I've read so far, so it will probably be up to testing. The range probably is dependant on the focus of your camera and the resolution of the camera's image.

[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

As far as GP... there's lots of things that would be not GP if interfering with another team's autonomous mode is unGP. You couldn't bump them or get in their way or anything. The teams last year that tore out of the starting gate to put a goal in the way of the other robot were being unGP as well then.

Bumping somebody's robot, while it might interfere with a robot's autonomous program, is part of the game. It is possible to anticipate this and if you are really good, work around it using sensors. If you are indeed using guidance, rather than dead reckoning (gee I wonder why they call it that? ) then a bump will be no more than an inconvienience.

But doing something deliberate to cause another's robot to see something that isn't there, is an entirely different matter. The nice term is "spoofing". It means making a something appear that isn't really there. The not so nice term is "lying". When you do this you are deliberately causing the sensor to tell the robot's RC an untruth. Lying is never GP.

If the rules specifically allowed this sort of thing and we were expected to cope, then that would be a different thing.

ChrisH

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by ChrisH

Bumping somebody's robot, while it might interfere with a robot's autonomous program, is part of the game. It is possible to anticipate this and if you are really good, work around it using sensors. If you are indeed using guidance, rather than dead reckoning (gee I wonder why they call it that? ) then a bump will be no more than an inconvienience.

But doing something deliberate to cause another's robot to see something that isn't there, is an entirely different matter. The nice term is "spoofing". It means making a something appear that isn't really there. The not so nice term is "lying". When you do this you are deliberately causing the sensor to tell the robot's RC an untruth. Lying is never GP.

If the rules specifically allowed this sort of thing and we were expected to cope, then that would be a different thing.

ChrisH

I'll just say that I don't agree with this interpretation of GP. I'm of the opinion that it is futile and silly to try to apply GP to the entire game. If my plan was lying to a robot, then removing tetras from under a goal is stealing. Pushing another robot is assault. Actually breaking another robot is commiting grievous bodily harm, even if accidental. I could go on, but I think my point is clear. The game is the game, and robots are robots. Anthropomorphizing the robots and their actions is just silly and leads to some very odd conclusions.

I've been in the position of having a robot blocked and effectively immobilized so that we could do nothing against our opponent to win the match. I never once thought that they weren't playing fair or were being unGP by preventing us from doing anything. I was highly frustrated, but accepted the fact that they'd out-thought us and had a better designed robot. Or used their robot more effectively.

[russell]

Ok no one can possible argue with this:

<R93> Decorations must not affect the outcome of the match, and must be in the spirit of “Gracious
Professionalism.”

Whether or not your distracting the other teams robot is GP doesnt matter, because you "must not affect the outcome of the match". If you cannot affect the outcome of the match you would be better off just avoiding putting green on your robot, because a) you would be more likely to screw with your own alliances robots than those of the other alliance and b) when you did screw with your alliances robots, and you tried to protest the match on the grounds that your decorations had affected the outcome (by making your team loose), the judges would probly just reply with some equivalent of "that sucks for you"

[DantheMan]

Originally Posted by karinka13

We're thinking the same thing over here...would flashing a green light or spray painting your robot green be legal? We still don't have manual access.

It is illegal to have anything that can distract another robot.

[the_undefined]

I don't see any problems with Green Robot / T-Shirts guys.