How to get -130 In penalties

[SpaceOsc]

http://www.soap.circuitrunners.com/2.../az/az_022.wmv

Arizona Match 22
12 penalties by one robot.
1 by another

Red 1828 2134 1633 16
Blue 207 1515 2397 0

[nofar#1943]

lol..
"thank god we don't have negative scores"

[Tom Bishop]

Nice Hybrid, maybe a nice time to use the kill switch!!!

[Waynep]

I have to say I'm rather disappointed in the this thread and the posts coming from teachers and mentors. We should not be spotlighting this match in the manner that it is presented in this thread. Those students were pretty disheartened, I saw it on their faces, when the penalties were issued and now it's brought to the attention of the entire CD community which I think is really discouraging. We should applaud these guys for having the courage and determination to attempt Hybrid mode. What happened was literally beyond their operators control and they did not do it intentionally. Things go wrong; it happens to the best of us. You learn from it and move on. And if you are fortunate enough to be an experienced mentor that can help or can get someone to help these teams on the learning curve, you should rather than point out how to get 130 points in penalties.
-wayne

[FRC4ME]

Man, if I programmed a hybrid mode that did that the rest of the team would kill me!

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by Waynep

I have to say I'm rather disappointed in the this thread and the posts coming from teachers and mentors. We should not be spotlighting this match in the manner that it is presented in this thread. Those students were pretty disheartened, I saw it on their faces, when the penalties were issued and now it's brought to the attention of the entire CD community which I think is really discouraging. We should applaud these guys for having the courage and determination to attempt Hybrid mode. What happened was literally beyond their operators control and they did not do it intentionally. Things go wrong; it happens to the best of us. You learn from it and move on. And if you are fortunate enough to be an experienced mentor that can help or can get someone to help these teams on the learning curve, you should rather than point out how to get 130 points in penalties.
-wayne

I won't ding them for trying either--heck, we didn't even move in hybrid until Saturday at Chesapeake.

At the same time, this would make for a good teaching moment about the importance of the E-stop button in the alliance station--when you hit it, you do disable yourself for the match, but the referees will no longer score you up or down. If you see your robot moving like that, go ahead and mash the button and cut your losses. You'll be playing three-on-two for the rest of the match, but your partners stand a better chance to battle back from 30 points in the hole as opposed to 120.

[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.

[kborer22]

Originally Posted by Waynep

I have to say I'm rather disappointed in the this thread and the posts coming from teachers and mentors. We should not be spotlighting this match in the manner that it is presented in this thread. Those students were pretty disheartened, I saw it on their faces, when the penalties were issued and now it's brought to the attention of the entire CD community which I think is really discouraging. We should applaud these guys for having the courage and determination to attempt Hybrid mode. What happened was literally beyond their operators control and they did not do it intentionally. Things go wrong; it happens to the best of us. You learn from it and move on. And if you are fortunate enough to be an experienced mentor that can help or can get someone to help these teams on the learning curve, you should rather than point out how to get 130 points in penalties.
-wayne

I agree that this should be taken as a less to all teams, not thought of as going after a single team. I was there and saw this match, and like most teams at some point in time there was just a glitch in the programming and it happens. I think this is worth talking about because it happened at an event. We celebrate teams like 27 for their "amazing shooting" over the center divider,constantly talk about teams who get regional or national high scores in a match, or debate if 190's game plan is legal, so why not this?

[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!"