What things that happened the past season that FIRST could improve upon?
2 Likes
NEW ROBOT RADIO. With even more issues coming to light this year it’s WELL past time to retire it
154 Likes
Creating a score-capped game proved itself to be really disadvantageous this year (rise of swerve a huge factor), and while Team Update 21 largely solved this issue, I think Charged Up would have been better just having those rules in place from the jump. Score caps = awkward ties/penalty wins/etc.
41 Likes
This. Can we please move away from the 15 year old 802.11n standard on the FMS?
802.11ac, or even 802.11ax would go a long way of fixing the problems with wireless communication by opening up more channels and frequencies (Like the entire 6 Ghz frequency band) that can be reserved. The only issue, is that they are going to need to custom make a completely new radio with a Hardware partner for a relatively cheap price, which is probably the only obstacle to actually doing this.
32 Likes
A more difficult endgame would be more interesting. The charge station didn’t much in the way of an engineering or strategy challenge.
39 Likes
The charge station was a disaster. It just couldn’t take the abuse.
The field is still too vulnerable to WIFI issues. It was absolutely killing some fields in Houston.
FRC Queue should have been used at the Championships. It would have made life easier.
105 Likes
It’s interesting that the charge station was: the least difficult endgame, the most faulty, the most expensive, the hardest to replicate at home, and the most damaging to bots all at the same time.
Deep Space on the other hand was difficult to execute, exciting to watch, an extraordinary engineering challenge, and just a wooden box.
141 Likes
Perhaps not from the engineering or strategy side of things, no. But I did find it a rather exciting endgame nonetheless where I was regularly found perched on the edge of my seat waiting to see who would get that last minute balance, or who didn’t. From the spectators perspective, I thought it was extremely simple to understand, and added lots of excitement to the end of the game.
Just my $0.02 though.
45 Likes
A lot of the wifi issues would be resolved by upgrading the wifi standard the FMSField Management System uses, 802.11ac and 802.11ax are much more tolerant of interference, and won’t drop out the same way that 802.11n does. Not only that, but both these standard have additional frequency bands, or greater channel channel binding size. And that isn’t even getting into MU-MIMO or OFDMA, which would allow for beamed wireless connections.
EDIT:
ACTUALLY, the common FRCFIRST Robotics Competition Radio is already 802.11ac Compatible. They only need to upgrade the FMSField Management System Wireless Radio to a 802.11ac radio that’s compatible with 4x4 MU-MIMO.
10 Likes
The last second (literally) triple engages we amazing to watch, but I felt like I was only captivated by the endgame in finals or Einsteins matches. A good endgame should be interesting not just in the highest levels of play.
12 Likes
AprilTags were overall not accessible enough for teams.
43 Likes
How so? I thought they were extremely accessible considering this was the first year they were rolled out.
I’ll note that I am comparing this to when vision/retroreflective targets were first introduced, and it took years for it to be considered widely accessible to most teams in FRC.
23 Likes
With OpenAlliance teams more or less all doing Apriltags, I have to wonder how true this actually was. Agree with what @cad321 said as well.
13 Likes
I don’t know much about RF and wireless communications, and even less about international laws and regulations, but my understanding is the biggest hindrance to a new radio is developing a system that is legal for use across all of the international events taking place under different sets of government restrictions on broadcasts. Would these different standards be allowed in all the countries where there are currently events, and countries where there will likely be events in the next 3-5 years?
4 Likes
In 2016 and 2017, FIRST included statements that the requirements for the bonus ranking points may be updated at district champs and championships; this was done in 2016, but not 2017. So, why did they just drop this from the rules? It’s hard to predict widespread robot performance, but surely they would have considered ‘What if this game is too easy? What if the max is reached?’ and have addressed this at kickoff or at least near the start of the build season.
If even the possibility of supercharging grids was introduced earlier, I do think this would had influenced robot designs and strategy.
8 Likes
So, 802.11ac doesn’t use any new frequency bands, so it would be allowed anywhere 802.11n is, but with MU-MIMO you could get around the current interference problem very easily since it would now be a beamed connection to the robot. If a robot disconnects, you won’t have the cascading failure that you have now as well.
As for WIFI6/WIFI6E/802.11ax, the EU approved the general WIFI 6E 6ghz frequency back in 2021. I’d imagine that most countries would allow it eventually, if they haven’t already allowed it yet. However, it should be stated that you don’t need to have the 6ghz band in order to run 802.11ax and get the beaming, and interference tolerance benefits from this standard either.
Here’s an image from the WIFI Alliance showing countries that have approved part or all of the WIFI6E Frequencies
EDIT:
ACTUALLY, the common FRC Radio is already 802.11ac Compatible. They only need to upgrade the FMS Wireless Radio to a 802.11ac radio that’s compatible with 4x4 MU-MIMO.
5 Likes
I disagree with it not being an engineering challenge. Like the low bar in 2016, savvy teams built bots that met size requirements that would make the endgame easier to accomplish
16 Likes
Stating the obvious here but the charging station broke way too much. Also there is way too much of a focus on sticking to the match schedule (which doesn’t happen anyway) than making sure every robot on the field is connected and good to go. The field staff on Johnson were great and really cared about getting everyone up and running for every match but I feel this should be a standard at every event.
7 Likes
Agreed 100% but with a few nuances.
Tracking an AprilTag in 2d space was relatively easy, as if it were a retro-reflective target thanks to Limelight & PhotonVision!
However, due to the placement locations on this year’s field, one could not track a 2D AprilTag like a piece of retro tape (as in a simple PID controller which assumes you can always see the tape), since in most cases, robots could not see one when scoring.
Pose estimators, which required 3D AprilTags, were also difficult to implement in a way that was reliable enough to use for all scoring.
I think next year if the GDC adds more AprilTags visible from more locations and more teams work with the WPILib Pose Estimator we will see better vision adoption.
23 Likes
I think inconsistant lighting and too few April tags led to many top teams ending up back at Limelights. Without an extremely built out vision system (like from 6328), our team found it difficult to get accurate pose estimation working properly.
You can see that many top teams decided not to go this route with 1678, 2056, 4414, 1323, and many others all ended using retroreflective targets for alignment.
3 Likes