2005 - Radio Communication

[EricH]

And not only do you get situations like Ethulin described, but then there's where a whole team starts yelling at the drivers to do something. Of course, the refs and drivers have a hard time hearing it over the other teams and music and crashing of robots, and this is extremely common, so they will likely let it slide.

Back to the original question, I think the general rule of thumb is, no talking to the coach during the match unless you are a driver, and definitely not by radio/cell phone/flashlight(Morse code and equivalents)/hand signals. Yelling at him is likely not a good idea because he may get distracted, and you don't want that, do you?

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by EricH

flashlight(Morse code

If anyone is truly capable of reading and understanding Morse code while playing an FRC match, I think we should let them. I mean, that would be some crazy skills. Someone as skilled as that deserves to have a rule exception in their favor.

[Ethulin]

Originally Posted by EricH

And not only do you get situations like Ethulin described, but then there's where a whole team starts yelling at the drivers to do something. Of course, the refs and drivers have a hard time hearing it over the other teams and music and crashing of robots, and this is extremely common, so they will likely let it slide.

Back to the original question, I think the general rule of thumb is, no talking to the coach during the match unless you are a driver, and definitely not by radio/cell phone/flashlight(Morse code and equivalents)/hand signals. Yelling at him is likely not a good idea because he may get distracted, and you don't want that, do you?

Agreed. But I really wonder what will happen when something like my situation DOES happen and the loosing team protests.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Ethulin

Agreed. But I really wonder what will happen when something like my situation DOES happen and the loosing team protests.

Absolutely nothing, because you described the most outlandish, implausible situation ever.

People are reading way too far into the rules.

All it means is no blatant forms of communication between the drive team and members not on the field. Ie: no radios, cell phones, or other verbal communication. No signaling to the drivers from off the playing field.

If you move on to "implied communication", so to speak, FIRST would need to find twice as many refs so half of them could police the stands and make sure nobody groaned in the wrong place at the wrong time

[Ethulin]

Originally Posted by Cory

Absolutely nothing, because you described the most outlandish, implausible situation ever.

People are reading way too far into the rules.

All it means is no blatant forms of communication between the drive team and members not on the field. Ie: no radios, cell phones, or other verbal communication. No signaling to the drivers from off the playing field.

If you move on to "implied communication", so to speak, FIRST would need to find twice as many refs so half of them could police the stands and make sure nobody groaned in the wrong place at the wrong time

If they meant blatant they would have said blatant. The reason they did not is because one man's blatant is another's covert.
As a soccer referee we get into situations far more outlandish than this and do not disregard them as "outlandish" but we apply the rules and find the correct course of action.

In soccer we have things called "FIFA clarifications" similar to what FIRST has just for these kind of situations, but nothing is just disregarded for being improbable or unlikely.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Ethulin

If they meant blatant they would have said blatant. The reason they did not is because one man's blatant is another's covert.
As a soccer referee we get into situations far more outlandish than this and do not disregard them as "outlandish" but we apply the rules and find the correct course of action.

In soccer we have things called "FIFA clarifications" similar to what FIRST has just for these kind of situations, but nothing is just disregarded for being improbable or unlikely.

FIRST has told us to take what the rules say at face value--ie: don't become lawyers. It seems like the intent of the rule is fairly clear.

As for the exact situation you describe, everytime I've seen a robot get flipped, the opponent ends up cheering and the flipped team stops cheering. I don't see how this could possibly be interpreted as violating the spirirt of the rule. The odds of this ever occurring are so low as to be a non factor. In fact, it's probably never happened once since 1992.

Speaking from experience in last years game (which was probably one of the hardest ever to ref), referees have way too much to deal with already to add something as subjective as interpreting crowd noise as being unfairly advantageous to a team in such a situation.

If every rule contained verbiage to cover every single situation that may or may not come up, there would be multiple phone book sized volumes. Instead we just refer to situations using the basic guidelines given, and common sense.

$0.02

[Covey41]

I guess I did not express my thoughts very well in my first post. The original intent of the rule goes back to the "old days" when the robot controls left alot to be desired. It was strickly a case of radio interference, that the no 2 way radio rule was developed. This was also before the popularity of small hand held cell phones. The old transmitters and receivers were very sensitive to any type of radio frequency intererence, causing the robots to be uncontrollable. While the IFI controls are much better, they are still susceptible to RFI.

Any good RF engineer will tell you that filling a area full of RF energy, is like a room full of noise, it gets hard to hear the one voice that you want to hear. Radios use filters to single out a single the frequency that they want to use. These filters and associated circuitry can get quite expensive, and bulky. In an effort to control costs, minimal filtering is used. Necessitating the the no 2 way communication rule.

This is also the reason anytime a team wants to put a wireless TV camera on their robot they have to have it approved by IFI. To ensure it does not cause interference to the control system.

It has only been a secondary ruling that the no communications with the drive team was put into effect. It is also the reason that 2 way radios are not allowed to be used in the pits, by the teams.

[KenWittlief]

Im not sure I agree that 'no communication' with anyone else is a hard and fast rule.

I would think that having someone acting like a 3rd base coach, standing along the sidelines, with pre-arranged signals and gestures would break the rules

but, well for example: couple years back, the year with the containers and the ramps. Our bot had 4 wheel drive. In the last several seconds one of our wheels completely fell off the bot. The drivers simply stopped driving and took their hands off the controls. I was standing at the side of the field, pointing to the top of the ramp, jumping up and down and yelling "GO! GO! GO!"

the driver saw me and got the bot to drag itself to the top of the ramp in the last seconds.

Is looking at your team mates and mentors along the sidelines cheating? Is that considered communication? Does it violate the intent of the rules?

[Ethulin]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Im not sure I agree that 'no communication' with anyone else is a hard and fast rule.

I would think that having someone acting like a 3rd base coach, standing along the sidelines, with pre-arranged signals and gestures would break the rules

but, well for example: couple years back, the year with the containers and the ramps. Our bot had 4 wheel drive. In the last several seconds one of our wheels completely fell off the bot. The drivers simply stopped driving and took their hands off the controls. I was standing at the side of the field, pointing to the top of the ramp, jumping up and down and yelling "GO! GO! GO!"

the driver saw me and got the bot to drag itself to the top of the ramp in the last seconds.

Is looking at your team mates and mentors along the sidelines cheating? Is that considered communication? Does it violate the intent of the rules?

Hm. Good scenario. I tend to think it does, though personally I think that it SHOULD be allowed but under the laws it is not.

[KenWittlief]

there was no pre-arranged understanding for the drive to to watch me on the sidelines for directions or coaching, so at what point does it violate the rules?

if the whole team was jumping up and down yelling GO! GO! GO and pointing to the ramp, would that be illegal coaching? half the team? two people? the mentors only? two mentors?

[EricH]

Mybe you should say it this way: No pre-arranged coaching (over airwaves or otherwise) allowed, other than from the designated coach. If the drivers choose to listen to yelled instructions from the sidelines, then that is their choice. This is assuming that they can hear them over the music, other teams, their coach, the other coaches, and any other noise.

I have been in at least one situation where I did not hear someone cheering for me in a competition and only knew about it later. The same could apply here; the drivers may just zone out everything except needed information. In fact, it is quite probable that even if you do try to communicate with them, they will ignore you to do what they need to do.

[Ethulin]

Originally Posted by EricH

Mybe you should say it this way: No pre-arranged coaching (over airwaves or otherwise) allowed, other than from the designated coach. If the drivers choose to listen to yelled instructions from the sidelines, then that is their choice. This is assuming that they can hear them over the music, other teams, their coach, the other coaches, and any other noise.

I have been in at least one situation where I did not hear someone cheering for me in a competition and only knew about it later. The same could apply here; the drivers may just zone out everything except needed information. In fact, it is quite probable that even if you do try to communicate with them, they will ignore you to do what they need to do.

Sounds good. But under the old rules there was no distinction, so you could not apply it. I think that that is opening a whole new can of worms, because then everyone will be talkin' bout what is "pre-arranged"

[Tristan Lall]

I see Ken's point here; a "no communication" rule might be difficult to enforce. While I don't think cheering should necessarily constitute deliberately giving the drivers information (at best, they're communicating information with regard to their approval vs. disapproval, rather than a particular action, strategy or status of the game), I do think that "3^rd base coaching" should be discouraged, or prohibited outright. Though the impact of the extra coach on any particular game is not easily quantified, I think that it might be easier from an enforcement point of view to simply ban it all (except cheering with no discernable message beyond "go team go"¹), and then deal with violations later, or permit it all, and make it clear that you may communicate as you please, be it with signs, hand signals, carrier pigeons or megaphones. By choosing an extreme position, we avoid the difficulty of requiring the referees to judge the level of interaction, and, if they feel it appropriate, to assign a penalty. The fact that the intent of the existing rules is not straightforward, and that no rule exists to explicitly cover several plausible situations (e.g. hand signals, shouting) just makes this type of call more difficult. (And it's perfectly understandable that, given a judgment call with shaky support from a strict interpretation of the rules, that many officials will likely choose to err on the side of leniency, which is simply a manifestation of the "permit everything" case, only now, someone has cause to complain about the decision.²)

I'm going to single out Cory's post here, because I don't agree that the intent is so clear-cut. Of course FIRST doesn't want interference with robot controls; that's the first, and most important reason why radios are banned. The second reason is to avoid drivers or coaches with an extra voice in their ears; that's also straightforward (judging by the Q&A response above). The point of contention is whether or not other forms of communication are valid; there exists a precedent for preventing deliberate signalling from the stands—but it was based on liberal interpretation of the rules. By the same token, there exist many precedents permitting teams to signal from floor level; shouting "up", "down", or gesturing at objects and locations, for example. So the question is, how much communication is too much, and how can FIRST craft a rule in such a way that it is obvious? If it's anything less than obvious, it makes more work for the referees, and can easily breed animosity over differences of interpretation, should such a situation arise.

Additionally, I take issue with the idea that the rules have to be thick like a phone book to be comprehensive. Though all-encompassing rules have a way of being long-winded, the trick is to (attempt to) be absolutely clear in one's choice of language, so as to communicate as much intent as possible, and to cover as many situations as possible, without wasting space on text that doesn't add any more meaning to the rule. In all seriousness, that offhand remark about lawyers (was it really Dean that said it; I don't remember) is being taken in a rather destructive direction—the fact that lawyers write long, drawn-out documents is a reflection of their understanding the consequences of not being precise. In truth, engineers ought to recognize the same—and very likely, most do, loath as they are to admit it. The fact that a rule is long, or that it specifies contingencies for unlikely situations doesn't make it a bad rule; it may be less fun for us to read, but at least you can't justify debating a call when the appropriate rule is specific, and the referee doesn't need to make an interpretation on the spot.

¹ For greater certainty, I'm not advocating an end to cheering, nor a draconian approach where one official monitors the crowd. Just a low-key statement in the rules that would have teams remind their members to avoid acting as spotters for their drivers.
² That their decision is final isn't important; of course people will express their dissatisfaction.

[N7UJJ]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

If anyone is truly capable of reading and understanding Morse code while playing an FRC match, I think we should let them. I mean, that would be some crazy skills. Someone as skilled as that deserves to have a rule exception in their favor.

Actually, we have a number of team members who have ham radio licenses and a bunch are studying to pass their test. A few do know Morse code, although they are not very proficient.
Part of mastering Morse code (or voice communications) is tuning out everything else. It is a skill a lot of people master.
Anyway, a lot of Morse code communications use abbreviations, not a lot of text (eg: SOS instead of " I have an emergency and need assistance") Just sending a "R" could mean turn right, "L" left and a few others. It would be real simple. Its a real advantage when the sender and receiving person speak different languages. They can still communicate a lot of information.
Morse code is alive and well.
There have been a number of times when the kids are queuing up and they need something from the pits (we forgot a battery once) We thought if we had a few kids to relay sign language messages, we could quickly communicate with the pits. Several kids learned sign language, but we were not fast or accurate enough. We even contacted a local school for the deaf to see if a few would join our team. It never materialized though.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I have been reading through this thread hoping to agree with some of the items and I am not sure I can. None of us have a clear idea what might have taken place from the stands to the driver's station when the that team was called for the communication infraction. That being said, I don't think that it should be interpreted as a blanket rule against communication from team or alliance members to the coaches or drivers. This has gone on as long as I have been part of this competition and likely since the beginning. I think the two issues here is one, no wireless communications and two, no communication from off field coaches to on field coaches. The first is a simple issue of interference with wireless robot communications and the second is a violation of the "one coach, two drivers, one human player" allowed per team. If a ref interpreted the actions of that mystery team as a violation of the second issue than he was correct in his enforcement.
Learning Morse Code is not that big a skill, even I have done it. At one time it was a requirement for boy scouts to know both the Morse Code and semaphore (flag code) for rank advancement. Millions of people worldwide have learned the code for their amateur radio licenses and use it regularly for their hobby. (Myself included, WB9UVJ)