How to get -130 In penalties

[rees2001]

How many of you watched the ENTIRE match?
They went on to make 8-9 laps, drive pretty well & have a good match. I wouldn't think the problem is the robot or the team but the rule. There is no reason such a small infraction should have cost the team 120 points! They never made contact with another robot, they never impeded traffic, they never even hit the wall in hybrid. So why get 120 points in penalties?

If you want teams to succeed don't make rules that penalize you for driving in CIRCLES.

[Josh Drake]

At the beginning of the Peachtree regional, our hybrid did the same thing if we gave it a delay command. We were lined up at the chain link fence, so we didn't cross the line. Our delay function in the program had an x-value of 0, but no y-value, so it did a tribute to team 342 and did circles. We got bugs like this worked out and by the end of the regional, we had a blue banner. I'd like to reiterate what others have already said, they did try a hybrid mode, and unfortunately the penalty got 'em.

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by rees2001

How many of you watched the ENTIRE match?
They went on to make 8-9 laps, drive pretty well & have a good match. I wouldn't think the problem is the robot or the team but the rule. There is no reason such a small infraction should have cost the team 120 points! They never made contact with another robot, they never impeded traffic, they never even hit the wall in hybrid. So why get 120 points in penalties?

If you want teams to succeed don't make rules that penalize you for driving in CIRCLES.

I'd say: if you know that your robot is going to start 1ft from a penalty line, perhaps you should test the ol' autonomous mode before putting your robot on the field. That looked like something that'd be really easy to catch in testing. Nobody forced them to spin in circles, they did it themselves.

"No harm, no foul" is a poor way of deciding rules that would quickly cause even more vitriolic threads than the harsh calling of G22 does. Instead of "-130 points in a match", you'd have "THOSE GOSH DARN REFS HAVE IT OUT FOR US, GIVING US A PENALTY" since it would then be more of a judgement call than a hard-set rule.

[Akash Rastogi]

That's a real bummer

The refs should've given them a break. Or they could have used the kill switch

[Kingsmen]

The same thing happened to my alliance at the boilermaker. Only it was 60 points in penalties and we ended up with 0 points. It's a real bummer

[Mihai]

I think the thread name is a bit inappropriate...Every team has its fair share of programming mishaps (our auton is still not working properly)...

But at the same time it is quite a unique event and we've discussed much more pointless things then this lol..

Originally Posted by rees2001

How many of you watched the ENTIRE match?
They went on to make 8-9 laps, drive pretty well & have a good match. I wouldn't think the problem is the robot or the team but the rule. There is no reason such a small infraction should have cost the team 120 points! They never made contact with another robot, they never impeded traffic, they never even hit the wall in hybrid. So why get 120 points in penalties?

If you want teams to succeed don't make rules that penalize you for driving in CIRCLES.

In general it's a fairly simple rule to guard against (this not being one of those cases): just be cautious after you make a turn and cross the plane. Our team has found a way to keep such careless penalties from occuring: make our drivers do 1 push up per penalty point (I don't recommend making the programmers do that for this bug...).

[Ken Streeter]

Originally Posted by rees2001

I wouldn't think the problem is the robot or the team but the rule. There is no reason such a small infraction should have cost the team 120 points! They never made contact with another robot, they never impeded traffic, they never even hit the wall in hybrid. So why get 120 points in penalties?

If you want teams to succeed don't make rules that penalize you for driving in CIRCLES.

This example is a very interesting scenario. The GDC has repeatedly answered Q&A questions based upon the intent of the rules, not the rules as written. The rule being broken here appears to have been written with the intent of requiring generally counter-clockwise travel around the track. The behavior of this specific robot really only breaks the "intent" of the rule once, but breaks the letter of the rule a dozen times. As a result, they are penalized a dozen times, even though, from my understanding of the intent of the rule, it would have been more desirable for them to have been charged with only one infraction.

I'm not sure how the rules could have been written differently to result in only a single infraction for this episode (without also allowing other undesirable actions) but I think the rules would be improved if scenarios like this one resulted in a single 10-point penalty, rather than separate penalties for each repeated back-and-forth crossing of the line.

I wonder if it would have been within the head referee's discretion to score this as a single penalty, rather than multiple infractions?

[Tom Line]

I watched that video and couldn't stop laughing - because we've all been there.

Last year our robot kept chasing one of team members no matter what we did to it. If he was left, the robot went left, etc.

Later we mis-adjusted a pid loop and our arm flailed around like it was trying to swat flies.

I personally backed the robot into a door and broke the lock mechanism.

While programming autonomous we couldn't figure out why we kept ploughing into the rack. Then we realized that our arm was 5 feet long, not at the center of the robot like the camera.

I feel a little bad for the guys, but at the same time, maintain your sense of humor. It's over, it's done with. Look back at it, laugh, and say "yep, that was us!"

[Cactus_Robotics]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I watched that video and couldn't stop laughing - because we've all been there.

I feel a little bad for the guys, but at the same time, maintain your sense of humor. It's over, it's done with. Look back at it, laugh, and say "yep, that was us!"

This is one of the teams we menored and they are rookies and didnt quite know About the kill switch, after this happend they seemed to have a good sense of humor about it. Its just one of those things that happen I guess.

[SpaceOsc]

For those of you who wonder if this thread is appropriate i will remind you that the language of this post is all neutral and stated as facts, no opinions whats so ever are mentioned, if you believe that this is an example of team perfoming poorly that is within your judgement. you are left to do with the facts as you will.

i only see an isolated event that is unusual and hence can and should be highlighted as so many other achievements and unusual game play is presented in CD. now not only do they learn from their robots performance but so do all the others who watch this. without this thread it would just be buried and lost.

when i heard a team had 130 points in penalties, my first thought was

HOW?!?

i imagine you would ask the same

and this video provides an answer.

there is a very real disconnect over intent of rule and literacy of rules this year. this event highlights the extreme nature of not following the spirit of the rules.

[Donut]

I want to say that I'm impressed with how 2397 handled this match. After an unfortunate hybrid mode that would have destroyed the motivation of many drive teams, they still went out and ran a penalty-free match while scoring 7 laps. 2397 really stood out to me as a team that refused to give up both in this match and in their build. They came to the Duel in the Desert scrimmage 3 days before ship day and didn't even have a working drivetrain, some of our members and members of other teams helped them enough to get the wheels chained to the transmissions but I still don't think they drove around at all that day. Over the few days left of build and Thursday at the regional they attached a ball knockoff that actually worked well and got their robot moving; they went on to be the 2nd best lap runner at AZ (from our scouting information) and I believe only missed the playoffs due to being penalty prone.

Their members took this match pretty well from what I heard, but it did unfortunately kill off any more tries at autonomous by them. A few teams came over to help disable their autonomous and figure out what happened (we never did find out what caused it as far as I know), and they pretty much told us to make sure "the robot never moves in autonomous mode again".

[Justin Montois]

The game announcer's comment about the negative scores was uncalled for.

I'm sure they felt bad enough about it without having to hear that.