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#16
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
I think GLR was pretty rough today. First off, auto scoring was down most of the day. Scores were based on the referees, which I think was as inaccurate as the computer system at times. The refs decided to also make the offesnse/defense random becuase whenever who won autonmous was placed on defense first, their score defaulted to 540 for no apparently reason. It was finally fixed for Match 53. In Match 53, the field equipment decided to die. CD 47's robot never went out of autonomous. They reset the field and tried it again...then no one went into autonomous. They rebooted their equipment and CD's robot still stayed in autonomous. They finally swapped out field equipment. We almost had to replay a match because the team before use used the E-Stop in the match** and no one reset it. We caught it right before the start of the match when we didnt know why only our alliance light was flashing. The scoring display in the pits also malfunctioned. Some teams Win/Loss was messed up, then it just stopped working all together. There were also various disputes regarding the penalty flags being thrown for back bots, but i'm not even gonna go on that rant.
** We were told to E-Stop if we flipped over and were dead for the match to avoid issues with offesnse/defense and the back bot because the disabled robot does not count as one of the 2 robots. Last edited by KTorak : 10-03-2006 at 20:32. |
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#17
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
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Ricky from IFI would have noticed it on the scanner if the match had gone on any longer. (On a side note, that scanner is amazing - it picks up all sorts of useful information such as battery voltages and disabled states, just by intercepting the communications between the various RCs and OIs. It's thanks to it that the staff is able to warn teams on the field about dead backup batteries and the 8.3V bug. So far, we've been able to catch and rectify every single control system problem brought about by a team's negligence, before the match starts.) |
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#18
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
THIS should give you an idea of how well the scoring system worked at GLR.
??? There were three to five system reboots About six re-starts - five software, one hardware. Automatic scoring was unreliable. Went to human counters. Lost match list during third match. Teams -1, -1, -1 both won and lost many matches Red started on offense no matter who won autonomous in way too many matches. Chains did a good job at preventing lightning from striking players; not so good at dampening shots. Winners became loosers and vise-versa early in the day; then it flip-flopped. |
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#19
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
My experience with the field at UTC:
Ok, so on thursday we didnt get a single practice run in do to our robot being 10 pounds overweight. We got it fixed thursday night and today we had more stuff break. But all that doesnt matter, we got about 3 rounds on the field today, 1 of which we got a dq for. heres what happened: We had 2 and 1/4 inch bumpers on our robot, and the driver decided that we should go for the lower goal. We drove up to the goal, but our shooting mechanism had an error we ended up pushing balls in. Now to the fun part, when we pushed in, we rammed it with full speed, bending the plexi-glass and triggering the light sensor, we dumped a few more balls, and rammed it again. At the end of the round we all sat and wondered why the score for our alliance was up in the 200 range. Then we got disqualified for "intentionally" getting our robot in the light sensor. I dont think that we deserved the DQ, but oh well. Other than that I saw control of the robots on the field go out a few times and 1 match restart. I was in the pit getting yelled at most of the day so I didnt really watch much. |
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#20
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
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#21
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
Florida Regional had two rematches held at the end of the day. There were a few -1, -1, -1 teams, but overall it was decently decent.
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#22
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
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The scariest field moment wasnet even the fields fault! A robot during the match before us had some autonomus problems and made a full speed run directly at one of the field door/ramps. Hit with enough force to disengade the lock, flop down the ramp, and pop out the plexi covering. my drive team was standing just feet from where it happend waiting for our match, Made all of our alliace jump and take a few steps back! Also, Bob from Innovation First at Buckeye was amazingly helpful. Team 1278 has been having many RC gremlins, and he has always been able to offer a helping hand or a suggestion! Last edited by Rombus : 10-03-2006 at 20:49. |
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#23
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
Great Lakes regional field problems galore. The crew is really trying to make things work, but the system just doesn't seem robust enough to handle the situation at hand.
So many problems with the scoring software that they simply gave up and went back to humans keeping track - in close matches where it isn't obvious, when autonomous ends the scorers "report in". The match is put temporarily onhold until they figure out whom won the autonomous period and then they restart the timer announcing which alliance is on offense. If no one wins the auton period they "randomly" select a color to go on offense. The score board isn't working most of the time - so you don't really know what the score is unless you somehow keep track in your head. At the end of the match the head ref announces the penalties (I like that part because then you can figure out which robot/team is doing silly things to get penalized) All in all - I feel really bad for the good folks that have volunteered to coordinate and run the regional event - it must be difficult dealing with the inconsistent and unreliable programs and systems. Unfortunately, I think the delays and problems distract from the game - it makes the game choppy and even more difficult to watch/understand. Last edited by meaubry : 11-03-2006 at 06:09. |
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#24
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
I wanted to get some sleep before I posted this. I am the game announcer at Great Lakes and the scoring system situation here is a nightmare. The blue alliance station real time score was accumulating most of the day. Meaning, after each match the blue alliance real time score would not get reset to 0. Even if red won the auton, the scoring system would place the green light on for the red alliance. However, the refs are doing a miraculous job at keeping track of who really won auton.
A scoring laptop reboot seemed to fix that problem and the real time started working (somewhat) again. In matches 1 through 11, some of the results got transposed (red won, but blue got the win). This was human error and the rankings will get fixed before teams arrive this morning. I think the system will be working much better today because we identified some software and hardware problems. However, we will still be using human back-up for scoring. The real time scoring was working for the last few matches of the day, but the red high goal was not counting balls. I think that is also fixed. -Paul |
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#25
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
The field is working much more smoothly than last weekend here at UTC. The sensors, when cleaned, are usually only off by one from the human real timers. Our one rematch was from a sensor not sensing a ball and thus giving the wrong person the autonomous. We had one false start b/c the blue side wasn't responding during autonomous. The sensors start going to crazy when the robots have been hitting the side goals and when the ball foam parts are getting on the lens. John, our Field Supervisor is doing a wonderful job with fixing those. Mark, our FTA, keeps on top of making sure the counts and the field our working. The rankings are working fine. The pit computer decided to show the results from BAE when a cable got cut, but once we reran the cable it was showing the results from UTC again.
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#26
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
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#27
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
I was not there, but listening to the webcast, it sounded pretty bad at GLR.
From what Copioli and Verbrugge were saying I suppose the Real Time Scoring system was sufficiently unreliable that it caused more confusion than help in knowing who was winning. Also, it seemed like there were a lot of software lockups, mis-scored autonomous periods, and gremlins of 100 other kinds. Is that pretty much how it seemed to those actually attending? For what it is worth, my wife attended Friday AM and was baffled by the entire game. I think that was when the real time scoring system was totally off, so it kind of confirms my believe that this year's game really requires a reliable real time scoring system. Joe J. |
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#28
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
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I've noticed the spectator difficulty as well. I suspect it stems from the fact that in all previous games you had a decent shot of telling who was winning by just a glance at the field. This year, if real time scoring isn't working, you can blink and not have a clue who's winning. |
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#29
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
So here's the report from GLR.
First many thanks to John from IFI, Ron from FIRST and all of the scorers and the rest of the volunteers. Personally I am exhausted, this was a very trying weekend for the field team. I'd also like to thank the students, coaches and mentors for their patience and unending professionalism. I apologize if I lost mine at any point and I hope everyone had a great time. In general the robots were the best I've ever seen (except of course for the fires ).So here are my observations on the field and scoring. Starting Friday Morning: We realized after the first couple of matches, that when we went to enter the ramp points and penalties, the electronic score erased. After the third match, the entire match list disappeared, we got it back a few matches later (we continued to run off the printed list, but scores were lost and we had to start scoring over. At this point, I decided we would use human scoring as the official score. Not perfect, but verifiable and consistent. So then, after match 11, we realized the head ref was transposing scores on his sheet (thanks to team members for bringing this to our attention), to be honest, at that point, we had our heads buried in attempts to fix the scoring system, and were not actually watching the matches. By late morning, the blue side of the field scoring went haywire, 42 points in every autonomous period, (+10 points), also the end score for blue was 132 points regardless of the actual scoring. At this point I decided to shut off the real time scoring display as it was pure nonsense and we had been relying on the manual scoring anyway. After lunch we determined it was not a sensor failure, but instead a DAQ box to to scoring computer comm issue. After re-initializing the DAQ box, rebooting the blue scoring computer (at the red end) and the main scoring computer eventually we happened upon the correct sequence, from that point on, the scores were recorded correctly. We monitored for a while before putting the score back on video, but had real time scoring back up before the end of the day. I chose to keep the matches going using manual scoring and put fixing the real time system on the back burner in order to stay somewhat close to schedule. In late morning we experienced a failure to initialize a robot on the blue end. We replaced the arena controller and it ran fine for a while, the problem re-occured later in the afternoon but worked after a match restart, so we limped through the last couple of matches of the day. After the end of competiton, we tested the units, replaced the station relay and tested some more. Saturday Morning, as we were finishing field testing after rebooting and reinitializing all computers, DAQ boxes controllers, etc... We found the initialization problem had spread to another station, on the same end. After failing to clear the problem with another arena controller, we replaced the entire box during opening ceremonies. This of couse failed to correct the problem until I combined relays from stations in both panels from stations which had not failed. From this point onward, things actually ran well, too well of course, as lightning struck in match one of the finals when the field froze at the end of autonomous mode. The cause was a reported red zone "ball in chute", essentalltially the DAQ box on that end lost the reset signal from the main scoring computer. Another reset of the DAQ box and we were off to the races. Again, thanks to everyone for their patience and professionalism. Thanks especially to the manual scorers for doing an excellent job of scoring game which was clearly not designed for manual scoring. Also many thanks to teams 66 and 33 for help with set up and teardown, team 857 for help with field clean up and set up Thursday night, ITT Technical schools for additional "volunteers" to help with scoring, and all the rest of the volunteers. Without them none of this can happen. Ben Tower GLR 2006 Field Supervisor Last edited by Btower : 12-03-2006 at 08:00. |
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#30
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
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Ben |
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