pic: Game hint

[Ben Piecuch]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

In my opinion, this isn't going to be useful outside of autonomous mode. Or at least only marginally useful. Why? because if it was exceedingly useful outside of autonomous, it would have to be indicating something on the field that drivers and the audience couldn't see. And any scoring method or game influencing state that's invisible to the audience will drive them absolutely batty and quickly frustrate them. Similarly, I fully expect that whatever this indicates during autonomous mode will be readily apparent to spectators. And thus could be potentially determined by the robot by other means. It's just that those other means are probably going to be a lot more complex and less reliable.

I find it hard to believe that FIRST would go through the trouble of making this component, and then only using it for Autonomous. Here's a little history to prove this.

In '04, our first year with a "targeted" Autonomous, the game was poorly designed and didn't take advantage of this target after autonomous.

In '05, we "could" have used the camera for more than autonomous, but again, the game design didn't lend itself to using it.

In '06, the target was highly used by most successful teams in both autonomous and during the human operated period, and clearly communicated to the audience which team was allowed to score.

In '07, the target was again highly used by most successful teams in autonomous, and was designed to have been used during the game as a scoring aide. I'm not sure how many teams used it outside of autonomous.

In '08? Why would FIRST design a game that only allowed the use of this technology in a finite amount of time? Why wouldn't they want us to use it for the entire match? I think (okay, hope) that they've figured out how to properly integrate this in with the rest of the game. How they may have done that, well, that's their secret for a couple weeks. Whether it requires audience feedback is a different story. I'm wondering if this is going to replace the CMUCamera, or be an addition to it.

BEN