Week 2: So how's that Field Working?

[Btower]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I'll second. There were definitely problems with the scoring system even today. I believe they were pausing the match after autonomous to get the winner from the manual scoring. Also, the first match of the finals was restarted after autonomous mode. With no explaination, just a lot of waiting around for the crowd, and a foghorn.

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.

See my report below, the pause after Autonomous is due to the "ball in goal" sensors which allow all the balls in the goal at the end of autonomous to be scored as autonomous points. There is no way to manually pause the field timer.

Ben

[GaryVoshol]

I was working Pit Admin so I saw less than 10 matches before the finals. (For the finals I was switched to provide additional queuing assistance.) At the Pit desk, we heard very few complaints about the field or real-time scoring.

But if we could have a nickel for every question about the accuracy of the rankings, we'd be rich. We finally turned the monitor off, figuring no results were better than the wrong ones. They found the problem with that Friday night, and then the questions became, "But the score in Match XX isn't correct." - see the head ref. Sorry Ron, for having to send so many your way.

Hopefully the fixes described in this thread will make it better for the remaining weeks.

[Jack Jones]

If you want a warm and fuzzy feeling about the automatic counting, then you're headed for a let-down.

As you may know, GLR went to human goal count because they just could not believe those (EG) 478 low goal shots in practice.

They compiled statistics as to how many match results would have been reversed had the auto count been used.

Want numbers? Ask FIRST.

[KTorak]

I'd guess 90% of the match results would have been wrong if auto counting was used.

[Btower]

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

[mtaman02]

I was at the NJ Regional doing Field Repair & Reset

Scoring issues were rampant;
The end goals were close to being reliable but there was 4 volunteers station at each of the end goals to do manual scoring
During some of the matches the team numbers & ranks would not show up when the final score was displayed
During the finals matches the score would be 35 to 55 but after no penalties were deducted the score would be 35 to 0, which would confuse the MC's and referees constantly

As for the field;
The field remained in good condition the carpet suffered maybe 2 - 4 small tears in it.
The poof balls were also in pretty good condition: out of all the robots running over them & shooters shooting them the NJ regional only had to replace a box and a half full (however many comes in a box) which isn't bad considering 63 robots were using them constantly throughout the 3 days.
As for the poof balls getting caught up in the center goal there were not many problems with it maybe once or twice 2 balls got caught up on one another and didn't drop right away but the field manager stationed one volunteer on each end to release balls.

[DjAlamose]

The problem of balls not exiting the center goal was very common. It mostly happened when large volleys of balls went into the goal (happened often). Either that or the balls would get stuck in the bottom because the angel they were thrown in at was so low that they didn’t even hit the chains and would become wedged in the netting (I don't know how but it happened). But the scores were kept manually fro most of the comp and the real time scores weren’t even posted.

[hallk]

There didn't seem to be too many problems in St.Louis. A couple of times the scoring couldn't be shown on the screen. The biggest issue we had was the automonous not being counted correctly. For example, the extra 10 points wouldn't be awarded or not all the balls would score. Otherwise it wasn't too bad.