Next Year's Game?

[delsaner]

I'd like to see a game with a more 3-D field, similar to the FTC game this year. Something involving ramps or hills, but maybe the drivers would have a hard time seeing their robot. Just a thought.
=]

[Ryan Caldwell]

- Monkey bars (second level of play)
- multiple terrains
- flat sides
- grated center
- banked corners
- simple scoring (on ground)
- advanced scoring (elevated)
- king of the mountain/zone/object (end bonus)
- simple task available to aide advanced tasks
- no defense that can completely shut down scoring (was good this year)

[TJ Cawley]

i think a challenge would be having to "think outside the box" while fitting inside one and floating in it too. the idea of this year's game made people think of a water-invloved game. so why not give them one next year? its an idea, not unlike robots on the moon's surface, never tried on a FIRST playing field. it would introduce a greater difference in ideas and designs that would better differenciate one team's robot from another. there are a lot of ways to make a person float. so how hard would it be to make a 120lb robot float?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by TJ Cawley

i think a challenge would be having to "think outside the box" while fitting inside one and floating in it too. the idea of this year's game made people think of a water-invloved game. so why not give them one next year? its an idea, not unlike robots on the moon's surface, never tried on a FIRST playing field. it would introduce a greater difference in ideas and designs that would better differenciate one team's robot from another. there are a lot of ways to make a person float. so how hard would it be to make a 120lb robot float?

I guess you've never read the hundred and one discussions on why it can't be done in a FIRST competition. Possible? Yes. Practical? Not on your life.

Note that there is an underwater robotics competition. I don't remember the website offhand, so some of the others who do will have to help me out.

[EricVanWyk]

How about live ball sorting? It sounds rather lame at first (ha!) but hear me out:

Take the game piece (spheres, cubes, nerf footballs or whatever it may be) and color e.g. half white and half black. The one alliance wants white pieces in goal A, black in goal B; the other alliance wants the opposite. Put the goals on opposite ends.

This does a few things:
Adds a weird twist, could be fun.
Makes the difficulty of vision tasks more intrinsic and less dependent on lighting.
Lots of interesting sort options: presort+hoppers, "turret sort" (change target as pieces line up in the turret), "cerberus sort" (two heads that each remain locked on a target), "belch sort" (change turret speed based on whether or not you want the ball to go in), "driver sort" (only pick up the "correct" color), etc.


A third and fourth unsorted goal may be added with decreased points, to give teams a low-bar achievable target.


EDIT:
PS: Do we really have to debunk water games every time they are brought up? Lets just ignore it or answer it in PM.

[Nate Edwards]

Originally Posted by EricH

I guess you've never read the hundred and one discussions on why it can't be done in a FIRST competition. Possible? Yes. Practical? Not on your life.

Note that there is an underwater robotics competition. I don't remember the website offhand, so some of the others who do will have to help me out.

There are several competitions

The one run by a FIRST Team (842) is http://www.h2orobots.org/
Other include:
http://www.marinetech.org/rov_competition/
http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/water.cfm

[Scott Bahl]

the low friction surface was interesting, but it made it boring to watch becuase the game was in slow motion. also, i hated seeing a match decided by the scoring of a human player! this is a robotics competition, not basketball. another big thing was pinning! how frustrating do you think it was for us teams who spant long, hard hours building a great robot, only to see it being pinned and essentially taken out of the game by a robot nothing more than a drive base!

overall, i would like to see a more exciting competition, requiring more exciting robots(rather than just robots composed of a bunch of rollers).

if the people really want FIRST to expand, they need to make a "WOW!" competition, instead of just a "oh, cool, i guess." competition.

[Bertman]

I personally would like to see
1. no required wheels or supplier
2. move autonomous to the last 15 seconds of the round
3. no exotic type surfaces
4. no burdensome penalty system
5. continuation of challenging fun
6. Multi-level field

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Bertman

I personally would like to see
1. no required wheels or supplier
2. move autonomous to the last 15 seconds of the round
3. no exotic type surfaces
4. no burdensome penalty system
5. continuation of challenging fun
6. Multi-level field

They're not going to make the game have the same variables every year. This is basically "undo everthing they did this year and make it back to the way I'm comfortable with", which FIRST isn't in the interest of doing. They want no one to be comfortable in this competition, that's where people learn the most.

[mikelowry]

Originally Posted by EricH

I guess you've never read the hundred and one discussions on why it can't be done in a FIRST competition. Possible? Yes. Practical? Not on your life.

Note that there is an underwater robotics competition. I don't remember the website offhand, so some of the others who do will have to help me out.

underwater, yes. But what about floating on top of the water? Boats anyone?

[kitfisto92]

It may have a triangular or rectangular shaped game piece because it seems to has alternated between spheres in even years (generally [notably 2004, 2006, 2008]) with either a square of some sort (2003 stacking boxes) and tetrahedrons (2005)

Water sounds fun, but wouldn't that technically be an electrical hazard of some sort because of all of the electronics and cRIO on the robots?

[ShotgunNinja]

Well, I kinda pushed the camera towards the start of this year's, maybe I can try it again...


How about something that REALLY pushes the envelope on getting (A) more dependency on the whole alliance working together instead of the "strongest robot", and (B) more focus on the higher-end manipulator devices?

How about robots lifting other robots? I remember the one year with the innertubes (2-3 years ago), when there was a bonus awarded to an alliance that could stack their alliance's robots, ie. by lifting them up, driving up on top of them, etc. Why not make that a part of the challenge? Requiring robots to lift or shift each other vertically to reach or manipulate the game pieces (Think Overdrive's overpass, hehe) would make for an interesting challenge.

Also, we should keep the camera systems, now that NI and Sun are on board for technical support (and supportive techniques) and some of the first-year bugs with camera synchronization are worked out. I think that the cRIO and all of its capabilities may finally have the chance of really being put to the test (Can anyone say linear accelerometers?) and that yes, this truly is like a whole new (*cough* season) beginning for the FIRST Robotics Competition. With the bugs fixed.

Oh, that might be another interesting thing... Bugs... ...oops, I better stop before this post goes denim.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by mikelowry

underwater, yes. But what about floating on top of the water? Boats anyone?

Well, if you can come up with a reasonably cheap, readily portable by a semi, easily cleaned, watertight, easy for a crew of half a dozen to a dozen or so to assemble, quick-filling, quick-draining, easily accessible by people with robots in hand, grounded field, put the schematic in the Game Design threads/forum here on CD. Or a way to waterproof the current field would work. Oh, and you probably want to make sure it's relatively easy to build a low-cost version. Either route you take, I'd like to see it. Just to show that a water game is, in fact, practical beyond soaking the carpet or playing outside in the rain.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that it's going to take some thinking and doing. And if you want to see one, you may wish to relieve the GDC of some of the stress of designing the field...

My ideal game would be to have a game object that isn't so easy to manipulate, like a traffic cone or a traffic barrel. PVC batons or hula hoops would also work. Throw in a common objective that only 4 or 5 robots can do (or only one alliance), and have it at the end of the game. Also a good autonomous objective. Add some terrain that has to be dealt with, like in 2003 and 2004. Bring back the varying box sizes/weight classes from 2007, too. That was really an interesting size/weight year.

[Bertman]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

They're not going to make the game have the same variables every year. This is basically "undo everthing they did this year and make it back to the way I'm comfortable with", which FIRST isn't in the interest of doing. They want no one to be comfortable in this competition, that's where people learn the most.

Actually, I am not thinking of things "I'm comfortable with". I was thinking more in terms of keeping down cost for building practice field and such for those of us that have limited resources, both manufacturing wise and monetarily.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by EricVanWyk

How about live ball sorting? It sounds rather lame at first (ha!) but hear me out:

Take the game piece (spheres, cubes, nerf footballs or whatever it may be) and color e.g. half white and half black. The one alliance wants white pieces in goal A, black in goal B; the other alliance wants the opposite. Put the goals on opposite ends.

This does a few things:
Adds a weird twist, could be fun.
Makes the difficulty of vision tasks more intrinsic and less dependent on lighting.
Lots of interesting sort options: presort+hoppers, "turret sort" (change target as pieces line up in the turret), "cerberus sort" (two heads that each remain locked on a target), "belch sort" (change turret speed based on whether or not you want the ball to go in), "driver sort" (only pick up the "correct" color), etc.


A third and fourth unsorted goal may be added with decreased points, to give teams a low-bar achievable target.


EDIT:
PS: Do we really have to debunk water games every time they are brought up? Lets just ignore it or answer it in PM.

This idea has a lot of potential.