Minibot's triggering targets?

[R3P0]

Originally Posted by Ted Weisse

As I was watching a few matches today I noticed many minibots being awarded wins while the lights on the towers remained racing and not "triggered" to indicate finishing place.

<G02> The AUTONOMOUS PERIOD ends when the ARENA timer displays zero seconds. The MATCH ends if all TOWERS are TRIGGERED or when the ARENA timer displays zero seconds, whichever comes first.

During the AUTONOMOUS PERIOD, the BASES will be illuminated in yellow. During the TELEOPERATED PERIOD, BASES will be illuminated with their ALLiANCE color. At 15 seconds before the end of the MATCH, BASES will flash yellow, while TARGET lights will flash green. At 10 seconds before the end of the MATCH, when HOSTBOTS may DEPLOY their MINIBOT without penalty, BASES will illuminate with the appropriate ALLIANCE color, while TARGET lights will show a green „chase‟ sequence. This chase sequence will continue until a MINIBOT TRIGGERS the TARGET, or time expires, whichever comes first. If a MINIBOT TRIGGERS the TARGET within the set time period, the TARGET light will illuminate to indicate in which place the MINIBOT finished. 1st place will illuminate all four lights to indicate the maximum number of points have been scored. MINIBOTS finishing in subsequent positions will illuminate fewer lights, with the 4th place MINIBOT illuminating one light, to indicate the fewest points scored

And Triggered from Section 1 is defined as:


TRIGGERED – the act of pushing the bottom disk of the TARGET so that the sensors are tripped and a signal is sent to the Field Management System (FMS). When a TARGET is TRIGGERED, the MINIBOT RACE on that TOWER is complete.

Was the system not working so the places needed to be done visually or are the minibots designed wrong so that they don't "trigger" the targets as required?

What did you see at your regional?

TARGET design fail.

Solution. Should be using either counter sunk heads on the target bolts or switch to a shoulder bolt. The issue i saw was minibots coming into contact with the pan head bolts, the hitting at this off angle it seemed to be getting caught on the thread that make it move up.

Our 5#'s of slamming minibot into it would not trigger it. At Kettering many minibot races were called by eye.

[Mr.G]

They came around and showed us at kettering that there are bolts that stick down out of the trip plate that don't move.

So if your robots hit those bolts the plate will not move and the tower will not be tripped.

The plates were not designed right. The bolts should have been mounted solid to the bottom plate and slide up through the top plate so that no mater where you hit the plate would still be tripped.

At kettering they used stop watches at each tower and confirmed against the computer. They field crew was very busy all weekend and should of had more help. Between the field comunication issues, driver station issues, and minibot issues. There was no time for them to help teams with communication issues with the field. Also there where only 2 practice rounds the whole event, meaning only about 12 of the 40 teams got to make one practice round. Everyone else didn't get a single practice round.

[martin417]

After having spent many hours acting as a high school swimming timer, I can tell you that this is a similar situation. There are "touch" pads at the end of the lane to automatically time the touch, there are people standing at the end of each lane with a manual trigger that is pressed when the swimmer touches, and there are two people with stopwatches that back-up the automatic system. Simple triple redundancy. If everything works, the touch-pads are the official score. The manual trigger is the backup for the touch-pads. In the event of a total system failure, the stopwatches are the official time.

Why not do something like that?

[Paul Copioli]

For those of you insinuating small bots are not triggering, that was definitely not the case at FLR. The switches at the top of the pole are simple limit switches that deflect easily. The false positives during practice at FLR caused the field team to basically disable (I don't know what they actually did, but only one pole was really triggering) the tower finish lines. The mini bots traveling up the pole in 1.5 seconds or less have at least 10 times the energy required to trigger at the specified trigger force.

I am sure the system will get fixed, but the tower is definitely the problem right now.

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Paul Copioli

The mini bots traveling up the pole in 1.5 seconds or less have at least 10 times the energy required to trigger at the specified trigger force.

I am sure the system will get fixed, but the tower is definitely the problem right now.

We had a lot of issues triggering the poles at Kettering. Fortunately the Refs were reasonable about this, and there were only a few actual minibot races that there was a concern of which alliance got what place. The switch on our bot had a push force at 1.5X the maximum force specified in the manual. The bot itself builds up enough momentum to make the 10 foot steel pole on the practice field jump (not properly anchored) when it strikes. Force is definitely not the issue...

[XXShadowXX]

The fault very much lies in the sensing equipment. I saw far more triggered by robots colliding with the the pole rather then minibots hitting the sensor.

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by pitzoid

So FIRST FRC Engineering Ryan at the NJ regional has been playing around with the tuning all weekend trying to figure out what works best

Indeed, the sensors seemed to be working fine in practice, but appeared disabled for qualification rounds. They were fooling with them often during the days, but the manual system worked well.

Originally Posted by R3P0

TARGET design fail.

I don't think so. The minibots were easily hitting hard enough to trigger the switches, more than hard enough to overcome incidental friction from screw threads. My suspicion is the voting system "wasn't quite right". By the end some towers indicated consistently, but that left rear one never, ever did.