Week 4: So how's that Field Working?

[bbguy5]

Yea, The numbers were always behind, and Paul did a great of announcing the correct team name. He mixed one number up, but oh well. He also worked in the spider monkies and Tie-dye under wear!

I can't beelive you were posting at 2 am paul!

[cdfps]

NYC was good. There were some game system problems, but nothing too out there.

We knocked one of the field access doors off in autonomous and got a penelty. I think a mild hit on the door shouldn't make it fall on the field, and if it does should not be a penelty.

My two cents.

[Melissa Nute]

The field at Boston had very few problems. Our automatic scoring was usually correct with the human scoring. Only one bad start during the elimination rounds because of a communication error with the blue alliance. Friday, we only had two matches that had to be restarted, once when the field randomly decided to turn on and the other from a communication error. We discovered that in the case of a tie during the elimination rounds, the score will not show.

[dubious elise]

As some of you have said, the scoring at WI was somewhat faulty [...scoring code, done dirt cheap!] but only during autonomous modes involving big shooters like 70, 494, 1103, 1625, and most notably, 111 who seemed to trigger a restart every match. The people manually scoring, however, did an excellent job (there were at least two crew members counting the balls entered on each goal).

In terms of field work, I know that our team was responsible for 1 or 2 powerful autonomous runs to the low goal which resulted in the lefthand side of each driver's station (position 1) being shifted backwards about 3 inches. After very regrettably causing damage to another team's elegant control system early Thursday morning (it flew off of the shelf and they were unable to catch it) in auton mode, we pulled our power back a bit in the same auton mode and were able to score goals very well. As far as I saw, the field was never "realigned" because of the immense amount of work involved in doing so, but this difference was negligible over the course of the competition.

[TheOtherTaylor]

From a driver's perspective, I had one simple problem with the field. The mid-line did not extend all the way to the edges of the field.

Now normally this really doesn't matter, but when a driver is the backbot and chasing balls around sometimes they come really close to the midline and do not want to pick up a penalty and so are being careful. But one time in SVR I remember driving to pick up a ball in the blue starting zones and realizing that from my angle I really couldn't tell if I had a wheel across the midline or not.

All the refs at midline crouched down and I just gunned it out of there to avoid a penalty but it was a close call.

I'd hope they consider extending that mid-line all the way to the edges of the field to help out the backbot driver who really doesn't have that excellent angle you have from the stands to tell where the mid-line is while cutting it close.

Anyway, back to your discussion on auto ball-counters

[Daniel Brim]

One thing that I noticed is that not every ball was counted when it went into the corner goal. We had issues with the score in a match, and they told us that they relied on the real time scoring, even though they said that it is not reliable earlier. Seems strange to me.

[Jeff K.]

Originally Posted by DanielBCR

One thing that I noticed is that not every ball was counted when it went into the corner goal. We had issues with the score in a match, and they told us that they relied on the real time scoring, even though they said that it is not reliable earlier. Seems strange to me.

Our first finals match, they didn't do the offense/defense correctly after autonomous. That caused such a huge delay to get the correct score, which ended up being a tie.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Stonefan5271138

Our first finals match, they didn't do the offense/defense correctly after autonomous. That caused such a huge delay to get the correct score, which ended up being a tie.

It took 20 minutes or more to figure the correct score after someone pointed out how impossible it was to get 13 points in auto with only one robot scoring in the corner. They way I see it, too many balls came in at once, flooding the corral and triggering the auto-score to count too high. Then the computer took over. The real auto score would have been 12-10, red. The computer saw 13-12, blue, and put red on offense first.

As a side note, multiple times during the finals (mostly) matches would be replayed due to the computer not picking a team for offense or lights not being on.

[tgraham_533]

Team 533 participated in the SBPLI competition this past weekend. I would first like to say that the volunteers and FIRST representatives did an excellent job of making the best out of a bad situation. I have a unique outlook on the game. I was a mentor for Team 533 and the father of one of the referees on the field. The scoring system was a major disappointment this season. As mentioned earlier, the real time scoring was turned off due to its inaccuracy. This left teams, mentors and spectators lost and resulted in numerous arguments after the scores were posted. We also suffered numerous incorrect scorings which resulted in the wrong team winning autonomous mode. In the early rounds, when these situations were questioned, the rounds were replayed, but as the competition went on the referees became less tolerant of these challenges and replays were not allowed. The last game of the finals was played 3 times due to scoring errors (one of which was called a tie) and autonomous problems. In the end, everyone competed and everyone was a winner, but I think the scoring problems hurt FIRST's reputation with the teams, parents and spectators.

[Commanchetruck]

The scoring at Granite State was terrible. When a robot got too close to a coner goal the scoring went way up. I think it had something to do with shadows. FIRST added refs to the corner goals but it didnt really help. During a match we broke down and only one of our robots got to the corner goal. The team started with 10 balls and picked up two on the way over and dumped them. One ball did not go in. The scoring system showed 9. At the end of the match the score was 9-9. We talked to the head ref who talked to the ref at the corner goal. He came back to us and said that the corner ref couldn't be shure how many balls went in. So we ended up with a tie instead of a win. Another time we were with two other shooters. At the 4th period one of the coaches said we were up by 40 and to not shoot anymore and just go on defense. It turns out the board scored wrong and thats where the coach had looked. We ended up losing the match where we could have won.

[AndyB]

Wisconsin Regional was AWESOME!

the venue was perfect. the pits werent too cramped, and the team social was the best ive been too. the scoring however gave me a laugh (stupid wildstang )

i heard we have a bid for the US Cellular Arena for 3 years so plan on coming back! also, i heard that FIRST wants them to have 50 teams at wisconsin next year! just a rumor, dont get too crazy, but who wouldn't love to see a super-regional in wisconsin. someone start taking notes at toronto.

[Mark McLeod]

SBPLI had it's share of field and scoring problems, but somewhat unusual circumstances also complicated field setup and checkout.

Problems are a little more understandable when you know that at the very last minute the venue was suddenly unavailable the day before practice day. The setup crew did not have the normal day in advance to do field setup, checkout, and to work out bugs in the systems.

The entire arena had to be setup by an extremely dedicated crew who were there for 24+ straight hours, beginning the very early morning of practice day.

My thanks for the Herculean effort required to pull this event off !!!

[Brian C]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Problems are a little more understandable when you know that at the very last minute the venue was suddenly unavailable the day before practice day. The setup crew did not have the normal day in advance to do field setup, checkout, and to work out bugs in the systems.

The entire arena had to be setup by an extremely dedicated crew who were there for 24+ straight hours, beginning the very early morning of practice day.

My thanks for the Herculean effort required to pull this event off !!!

Absolutely! Good point Mark and one that was overlooked by many (me too ) Thanks for reminding me.

The seeding program issue seems to be one that is haunting quite a few of the regionals though. Hopefully FIRST can resolve the problems with Hatch.

BTW Great job by your team and your alliance partners 271 and 870 in the finals at SBPLI. 358 is a class act all the way.

[Joe Johnson]

I have been away for almost 2 weeks. I am sorry that I did not get to posting this message. Thanks to Jack for starting the thread.

It is hard for me to get my arms around the issues.

Is it fair to say that there are still issues but that between the experience of the teams and the field crews, things are working well enough to muddle through the rest of the season?

Is the general sense that things are getting better week to week or staying the same? Again, it is hard to see the forest for all the trees.

Help catch me up.

Joe J.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

Is it fair to say that there are still issues but that between the experience of the teams and the field crews, things are working well enough to muddle through the rest of the season?

Is the general sense that things are getting better week to week or staying the same? Again, it is hard to see the forest for all the trees.

I may be biased since most of the field problems in Wisconsin seemed to happen when our team was on the field, but in my opinion the performance of the scoring system in Wisconsin was the worst one yet of the 4 regionals I've seen.

I think it is completely unacceptable that because the scoring system doesn't work right that the wrong alliance is frequently awarded the autonomous "win" putting them on defense first. Playing defense first is a big advantage in this game and when one alliance (say red) scores 10-15 balls in the center goal and the blue alliance scores 1 or 2 in the lower goal (or sometimes even none!) and blue ends up of defense first it is a huge screwup. Now, even though the 10 point bonus will be corrected at the end of the match, the red team is basically depleted of balls (since they shot them all) and is now immediately on offense.

Jack Jones put up some stats from Wisconsin showing that the scoring system incorrectly awarded the autonomous "win" about 22% (!) of the time. I don't think this is acceptable at all for the Championship. Since FIRST has already given up on the idea of using the automatic counters for the official scoring anyway, they shouldn't use it for autonomous either. The system needs to be reworked so that there is a pause after autonomous for the head ref to figure out which alliance won and then allow the scorekeeper to manually select which alliance is on defense first. My understanding is that right now there is no way to override the system to indicate the correct autonomous winner.

Oh, and the fact that the entire system locks up whenever a large number of balls is scored is ridiculous! We had a match where 2 robots each scored 10/10 (a big accomplishment in my opinion) and the field couldn't handle it. FIRST is putting big challenges in front of the teams to solve and we're doing it. How come they can't build a system capable of counting a few dozen Poof balls without locking up?

Week 4 and we still have a mess on our hands.