Human players and FIRST games

Competition Rules/Strategy
1

This came up in another thread, and I thought it deserved it’s own discussion. It looks like every other year, the GDC makes a rule that creates a huge “human element” in what is supposed to be ROBOTICS competition. Why have a game structure in a robotics competition where a human player directly (not through robot action) influences the outcome? If this is a human played game, why have robots? That was my biggest complaint about Lunacy, too much depended on the ability of a human to throw a ball into a trailer. How does this skill inspire students to become engineers? You might as well go to a horseshoe tournament if you want to see people throw unusual shaped objects with accuracy and distance.

The game itself is fine, very little change would be required to get rid of the “human factor”. If the rules stated that all game pieces have to be introduced through the feeder slot, and may not leave the lane unless by robot power, that would eliminate the “human factor” and keep it in the hands of the robots. I realize that since the robots are driven by humans, there is a skill factor already, but that only encourages teams to design and build a robot that is easy to drive, and as automated as possible.

I thought after Lunacy the GDC had heard enough complaints about this subject. Maybe I am in the minority. How do you feel? Would you like to see more human skill tests in FIRST games? Less? Or about the same?

2

Martin,
One of the perennial problems in this competition is robots breaking, turning over, random alliance assignments, and mistakes in judgment. The human player adds a little excitement. When all else fails, a team can still come away with a good feeling that they weren’t totally shut out of participating due to one of these problems. I have always liked the human player and in some games, that aspect added significant drama and excitement at the very end of a match. In some games our human players were very successful, 1997 for instance. In others, our human player made the difference in a crucial match. The highly charged finals match at the Midwest Regional against the Beatty crawler in 2002 our human player gave Beatty the needed points to win. You can’t write endings like that.

3

I would absolutely agree, except this presumed effect during Lunacy never occurred, unless you’re suggesting 67, 111, and 971 didn’t deserve to win and just had great human players? In the end, the best robots won the competition, regardless of the degree of human player ability.

4

I am not questioning the outcome of any match, or who “deserved” to win. I just did not like the fact that a single action, performed by a human, with no robotics input or interaction, could make significant impact on the outcome of a robotics game. That action did not come after great engineering feats. It did not come after a group of kids learned something new and exiting. It did not inspire anyone to change their college major from banking or communications to engineering or science. It just showcased an athletic ability of a single individual. In many cases this individual was not even a member of the robotics team, and had only been recruited for his or her ability to accurately throw a ball.

FIRST has a stated goal to inspire kids to enter the field of engineering, math, and science. How inspiring is it for kids to design and build the best robot on the field, only to lose the game because the high school quarterback landed a supercell in their trailer from all the way across the field? (I am not saying this event actually happened, it is just a what if question). In my opinion, it does exactly the opposite. It tells kids that no matter how well they may do in school, no matter what great inventions they create, the person with the greatest physical skill and athletic ability will usually win.

5

So, in general I haven’t minded the human player roles… Lunacy in 2009 was definitely an exception, though!

In Lunacy, the HP scored a very significant number of points! It certainly wasn’t uncommon to see a team’s HP scoring more than their robot… I think that should never be the case! The super cells were essentially just for the HP, as there simply was not enough time to consistently get them to a robot and have that robot score it. So, I certainly agree that Lunacy had too much HP involvement.

I don’t think the HP involvement has been too large (besides Lunacy) in recent years, probably excepting 2004. My in-depth familiarity only goes back to 2003, unfortunately! So, I wouldn’t say that FIRST has made this a trend, but I would certainly agree that 2009 involved too much HP influence on the results of a match.

2006 and 2007 come next in terms of HP influence, and I didn’t think their effect level was bad… Then the HP could score, but their ability to do so was very minor - they primarily just supplied/regulated the game piece flow!

In 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2010 the HP has relatively little involvement… Overdrive saw the HP/RoboCoach only acting to direct in “auto” mode, Stack Attack only had the HP placing the configuration of blocks out in auto, Triple Play had the HP physically loading the robot with a game piece (as an easier alternative to the auto-loaders, essentially), and Breakaway had the HP returning game pieces. Even thought the HP could incur huge penalties in Breakaway, they only had this influence on the match on a relatively few occasions.

I think Logomotion lies somewhere in between those two sets… The HP has the opportunity to get tubes most of the way to the scoring zone (very helpful!) but can’t actually score game pieces with anything akin to consistency - as far as I know, at least! :wink: They can definitely improve scores by performing particularly well; however, I don’t think their influence is as large as 2006 or 2007.

So, I would say that even though the GDC put too much emphasis on Human Players in Lunacy and Raising the Bar, those are the outlies rather than the norm…

6

When I’m in the stands and I talk to various people about the game, I talk about the human player’s role. It is always a benefit, from my point of view, to be able to talk about machines and humans working together to achieve a task or a goal. This season, I’ll be talking about Robonaut2 and the International Space Station as an example of the possibilities and their importance.

You can look at the game as a game or you can look at it as an opportunity to explore options and possibilities.

Jane

7

Lunacy’s need for a good human player led to one of our students finally reading drawings and building stuff and getting more involved in the robot his senior year…

You never know how things will work out.

8

Another thing is being the hp is a lot of fun. Also the fact of the matter is in the future humans will interact with robots. This is a way that First incorparates this into the game. Which is very ingenious because they allow for the interaction.

9

I can agree the final match didn’t come down to human player shots, because 5 of the 6 teams human loaded their robots, but the overall assertion is by no means correct. More than 55% of the points scored in Lunacy were by human players.

I think games requiring athletic human players don’t somehow de-inspire students already on the team. On the contrary, it gives the team a reason to recruit an athletic-oriented student who might not have otherwise been exposed to engineering.

10

2009 was 2009. There were angry threads back then, and I think that FIRST learned a lesson. I’m not going to say that '09 was bad. It was just a greater challenge of the game. Robots had to be aware of other robots on the field and the threat from a potentially devastating human player.

I don’t quite understand where the anti-human player feeling about this game is coming from. It was made perfectly clear that throwing or feeder slot loading is perfectly legal, I’m sure there were many discussions about this on this very forum. And at a certain point, it was purely a design choice.

As for how much the human player will change things, I can tell you that even the worst human player can get the tube to half way. And getting the tube half way is a lot better than running to the feeder slot.

Instead of thinking of this as something that’s holding back science and technology, try to think of it as another part of the challenge. At the very beginning of the year, people base their strategies and robots off how they think the game will play out.

Whether you think it’s fortunate or unfortunate, the human player position this year seems to matter, whether it’s more or less than previous years, it still matters. Never the less, it’s still a part of the game that we all have play.

  • Sunny
11

Martin,
In Lunacy, as in any game, strategy and game playing are part of the mix. If robot design or strategy (thinking, planning, brainstorming) consider the actions of a human player, then there is/must be inspiration for that interface.

Basel, if your input was a response to my previous post, you need to take a look at my team affiliation. The best team won, all working together.

12

I did not like the hp element in lunacy at all, we lost almost every game in midwest during qualifications because we would have 1 or 2 bots just sitting in their starting positions absolutely getting dumped on the entire match.

13

You have to admit that there was an group incentive there. You wanted to make sure everyone was running so that no one robot would be dead in the water and getting dumped on.

  • Sunny
14

There is only so much that you can do to help your alliance, especially if you are in a qualification round.

I feel that HPs have a bit too much of a role this year: A team with a good human player can throw all the way to the zones, entirely eliminating the midfield defense. What is the fun in watching a robot just hang tubes?

It is demoralizing for a team who worked hard for six weeks on their robot to be beat by a human player.

15

It would be funny to see a bot that puts up an 84 in wide net that just stops all of the tubes from being thrown accross the field.

16

As several posters pointed out, human - robot interaction is part of the future. Designing technology to work with people is an essential part of the engineering. Our robot in Lunacy could (and did) score on opponents, but we based our strategy on getting a lot of balls to our human player and trying to get other robots as close to him as possible. I don’t think I would want that much human scoring every year, but I also don’t think it killed inspiration. Certainly it did not for our team. As I said, we planned our robot design and strategy around involving the human player.

As for flinging the tubes this year, yes human players can throw the tubes. But it is NOT going to be nearly as easy as everyone thinks to get tubes to robots in the scoring zone. First off, there will be lots of tubes that hit towers and fall in the middle. Second, there will be tubes that land in the opponents lanes, off-limits to the side that threw the tube. Finally, some number of the tubes are going to either land short or hit the far wall and bounce back out of the scoring zone. In short, if people are throwing tubes during a match there will be a lot of tubes landing in the middle of the field. Which changes strategy.

Remember at the start of the season many people were arguing that picking up off the floor wouldn’t be that important? If you are not planning to throw any tubes that may well be true. But if you are planning to throw tubes, picking up off the floor is important. This means that a decision on human player strategy means a decision on engineering design strategy.

One thing that active human player involvement does is level the playing field. Look at some of the videos of really impressive robots that are out there for this year. A number of these (I am not going to throw out team numbers because I am NOT criticizing these teams) robots are beyond the capabilities of most teams involved in FRC competition. They are really marvels of engineering. And will no doubt be very effective. But a simpler robot paired with a human player who is accurate when throwing tubes across the field goes a long way toward a more even competition. And there is nothing wrong with that. The students are not going to be less inspired because their human player helped them win.

At our competition in 2004 their was a team with a really simple robot that basically only herded balls to their human player. But it was effective at getting the balls to the human player and she was really good. We had a really cool, well engineered (over-engineered and too large) mechanical arm and a fantastic winch (it once lifted two robots). From an engineering standpoint our robot was much more “advanced” than theirs. When they beat us (because she outscored our 50 points for hanging) our kids didn’t think that was wrong. They thought “Why didn’t we realize that such a simple ball gathering technique and a good human player could have made us a much better team?” That was pretty much exactly the sentiment in our plusses and deltas meeting after the competition.

17

What isn’t fun about watching a robot hang tubes? I love watching my team do it!

18

If teams on Einstein finals thought robots score better than humans, then that was probably the better strategy. Therefore human players can score all they want but robots will usually win out. Therefore Lunacy was a robot-based game, if with a larger human element than previous years. It can further be supported that the larger human element had little impact on high-level gameplay, especially for teams with the ‘right’ strategy.

19

Of all the thousands of teams in FIRST, if you base how the game was on an elite few, then thats not what the game was. If at regionals, the HPs were scoring most of the points, then that was a HP based game.

20

BEST YEAR TO BE A HUMAN PLAYER - 2009.You were heavily involved in the game and influenced the outcome of the match more often than not. Avoiding hot shooting human player became and actual strategy point.

WORST YEAR TO BE A HUMAN PLAYER - 2008. More often than not they had nothing to do unless you had a decent autonomous mode and then they just stood there for the rest of the match… Anyone could push a remote.

MOST DANGEROUS YEAR TO BE A HUMAN PLAYER - 2005. They had to run out to the side of the field with tall robots and there was the occasional robot that toppled into the lane. There were dire predictions on CD that a human player would get taken out by a robot and calls for mandatory helmets for them.

MOST COMPLEX TASK FOR A HUMAN PLAYER - 2006. You had to pay attention when to shoot and when not to shoot balls so your team could best operate during their period. Wasting shots when it wasn’t your alliance’s scoring period was one of the most inexplicable acts ever by a human player.