I feel bad for the poor sap who gets chimney-sweeping duty. Our friend Nathan seems to fight the drill the whole time during that video. I would expect that being a chimney sweep could make your arms tired pretty fast.
(I guess we just need someone who got swoll from field reset last year?)
They might as well just count all balls scored if the counter breaks. A pause between teleop and auto and then tally up all scored balls at the end of teleop. At some events, I could see this being a huge problem as only 270 balls can be scored in the entirety of teleop. Two good shooters(and maybe even one) will be able to break the Shrek.
I feel like if these need to be used for an event, then having hard cutoffs for scoring based on when it passes across the sensor is a rough deal. Then again, having the scoring cut off at the sensor sometimes and have it cut off at the end of counting after T=0 sometimes is also an uneven proposition.
Fun!
It is the sharpest tool on the shed.
It’s interesting to see that the field is limiting the robots rather than the robots limiting themselves. Our team personally had the 40 kpa auto in mind when we made some design decisions and it would be a true shame to see the 40kpa auto basically become impossible due to the field.
I really hope these won’t become common place at events.
And this brings into question the design of the original boilers themselves. Why design a super complex rotary scoring mechanism when you could’ve had a channel that counts the balls passively?
Same reason teams have active mechanisms to index their balls into their shooters instead of passive funnels.
In order to count the balls you need to first control them. Pass them through a channel only allows the balls to go through in a line, not jumbled, and you can count them passively using some sensors. But to get them into that channel, you need an active mechanism to serialize them, and that’s what FIRST created. The rotary system doesn’t actually do any scoring of balls, it’s only purpose is to shove the balls into the channel where they can be counted. Without that, you’re relying on a gravity fed system that acts like a funnel, and it will get jammed.
In hindsight, it would have been really cool to do the following:
Put a passive funnel in each boiler, but let teams place a chimney sweep with a pokey stick behind it (and still use field-provided ball counters once the balls are serialized).
Allow each alliance to utilize a weight allowance of up to 10 lbs per boiler (HE and LE) to install an automated ball serialization system. The system must slide into an appropriate fixture in the boiler (including mounting provisions and an output port into the ball counter), and may connect to a 12V power source. The chimney sweep may still be used, or not, at the team’s discretion.
An E-stop is present on each boiler and may be activated by a chimney sweep or field personnel to prevent damage to the boiler in the event of a problem. All boiler mechanisms must pass inspection, must not utilize any stored energy besides that which comes from the 12V power source, and must demonstrate that they fully discharge all electronics and come to a stop within 5 seconds of power being removed.
This is going to become an issue.
Methinks the GDC misunderestimated the scoring abilities of teams.
Finally seeing the guts of the boiler makes me question…
Maybe that’s why the Game Animation has a caveat about scoring fuel in the tele-operated period, but it doesn’t include the issues that may occur in autonomous.
Oh My.
Let’s put MORE team designed items on the field! That’s great, but you’d have the same problem we’re currently having with the ropes. The rules are just going to get more minute and minute until someone in RI3D comes up with a solution that works pretty well and the entire field will go with it.
No hate to RI3D, but that’s kinda what happened with velcro.
I think it will still be possible or they will make a way to make it possible
In the comments, frank said that would be the plan
Why don’t they just pack 2 extra serializers per field? Is FIRST really cutting it this close with the finances that they can’t afford to pack extras of this crucial item?
I would guess that size is the primary issue, not necessarily finances.
Each serializer is roughly the full size of the bottom of the boiler, up to where it starts tapering to the funnel. I suppose that they can be made smaller, but only in the vertical direction (unless you really want to get into major disassembly).
Each field is generally supposed to fit in one semi trailer, sans field carpet (which is new for each event, and shipped straight there). The trailers are usually pretty full of road case; it would be, shall we say, interesting to fit two serializers ready-to-go into one. It could be done, sure. But what else would need to be left behind?
That being said, if the ShREK had to be used, I would be highly unsurprised to learn that Plan C was to replace the damaged piece(s) with new one(s) obtained near the event.
Hey now!
Additional item: The past few years are really making me appreciate Aerial Assault more and more. The field elements consisted of walls, carpet, four cubic frames, four slotted holes, a truss which could have been replaced by a net, and LEDs. In 2014, we wasted no brain cells and no more than ten man-hours of construction to make our field elements. In 2017, We’ve spent almost as much creative energy and construction time on field elements to simulate actual conditions as we have on the robot, and the only thing we’re doing with fuel is learning to drive around it and keep it out of our mechanisms, and our field element construction isn’t over yet. Actually, we have spent FAR MORE on field elements in 2016 and 2017 than our CAW will total, and we do not have a room where we can set up a “full-time” practice field; we’re working out of a portable building and the end of a hallway. Such complex field elements inherently tend to favor high resource teams even more than the game needs to.
I also have to wonder that the game designers couldn’t come up with the solution that so many teams have figured out: have multiple tracks to serialize those balls. While my team isn’t doing fuel, it appears that it’s proven to be much less expensive/easier to serialize two fuel per second in each of three tracks than to have one five fuel per second serializer. That is, it appears that three fixed ShREKs operating in parallel (with three counters) could outperform the official serializer.
Edit2: reading forward about the trucks being full: THERE’S YOUR DATA POINT! If you don’t have enough space in the truck for spares of the field elements, the game elements are too complicated. IMHO, by a factor of three.
I believe it has to do more with space in the trucks (I heard it’s reaaaaaally tight this year), and also likely sourcing enough parts in time to build a spare for every field.
Truck space is something I had not considered. Interesting…
A few thoughts:
Yes, Aerial Assist had a much simpler field. It also had many complaints throughout the year that it was highly dependent on Referees seeing everything immediately, entering it into their tablets immediately, and not missing any action while looking down at the tablets. Let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like being a referee and not knowing where the ball went (did it score? high goal or low?) and knowing that a replay of the match was bound to happen. Even with several people dedicated to watching the field, mistakes happened.
Recycle Rush was certainly a simpler field, and while we tracked scoring in real-time for the audience display (and even had dedicated volunteers just to help the real-time scoring), almost all scoring was assessed as of the end of the match, which makes mistakes easier to deal with.
Stronghold had both the complex field and the need for accurate real-time scoring. It required a person dedicated to staring straight ahead and just tracking crossings for each side, and as I’m sure people have heard sometimes mistakes happened and things got missed.
People have been clamoring (especially after Aerial Assist and Stronghold) to have the referees doing less “real-time scoring” and more just “watching for problems”. I think many aspects of this year’s game are largely a response to that. (I hope it won’t be a lesson in “Be careful what you wish for.”) We wanted completely automated scoring, so here we are. Perhaps by the end FIRST will wish that they’d designed things a bit differently, so maybe the balls ended up in a large bin to allow after-match verification rather than the possibility of being returned to play or something like that, but that would be a different game. We managed to have automated ball counters in Stronghold without too many difficulties. While I think Stronghold was the more “complex” field, this field certainly has a lot of complications, and things that “just have to work”. FIRST has a lot of smart people, and so do all the events when things need to be improvised because “Stuff happens.”
Keep in mind, that even if the ShREK does need to be used, it’s likely (hopefully) as a temporary measure so that matches can continue while the regular equipment gets repaired or replaced. Somewhat like the matches last year where the Cheval de Fail couldn’t be selected, because having a not-quite-up-to-spec match can sometimes be better than having no matches at all. Hopefully it won’t need to be used at all, but I think people would rather some hack like this be used rather than not having an event. If there weren’t a specific plan like this, then people at each event would try to jury-rig their own plan (events are full of engineers, after all), and who knows how successful they would be. And if they do need to jury-rig something, and it works better, there may be refinements to this “backup plan” as the weeks progress.
In terms of truck space, I think that people don’t really realize the massive amount of logistical challenges there are in packing, transporting, and setting up a whole bunch of fields, on time, in a bunch of different venues, for several weeks running, all at the same time. They go over this in some of the volunteer training, but by many metrics FIRST is one of the largest “roadshows” in the world. All the stuff for the pits, the practice field, and the real field needs to show up exactly on time, neither early nor late, and leave on time, and be packed in such a way that it can fit right in the right truck. Every single time. If you ever can fit it into your schedule, go help with setup or teardown at an event. They need a lot of help, and most people aren’t there for it. The FTAs work very long days, and they can’t really leave until every single thing is back where it belongs and safely in the truck for the next week’s event.
The only acceptable way to implement this, IMO is to at the very least have a break between autonomous and teleop to allow for 40 ball autonomous routines to count. It’s too big and important a part of the game to remove.