Hello everyone. I was wondering if the drive team could look at the jumbotron to control their robot. The St. Louis Regionals happens Chaifetz Arena, which has jumbotrons in every corner. Last year, they showed the matches on all of them. In addition, the camera angle at the St. Louis Regionals seemed to be pretty top-down last year.
I was wondering if it would be legal to use the jumbotron to control the robot. You could look behind you with an Xbox/Playstation controller to do so. Even if you could, would it be viable?
There have been several threads already about this, with the basic idea that it wouldn’t be useful enough for precise driving anyway, even if it isn’t explicitly illegal by competition
H10 specifically only references the Alliance Wall, so technically if the screen is behind you or to the side it’s currently legal.
That said I would find it against the spirit of the rules, and fully expect a clarification stating that any and all attempts at drivers viewing the field from the drivers station through any means besides a camera on your robot is illegal.
As to if would be worth it: I think a driver with sufficient practice time would be able to nail the sandstorm period purely with muscle memory, at most with the coach looking and interpreting for the driver, and a well placed camera on the robot would almost certainly be better than either; No.
I could see this being a potential issue. Oftentimes, the scoreboard is hard not to see and it’s hard not to react to what you might see on the scoreboard that’s out of range for your camera. While I don’t expect teams to use this as a deliberate strategy, with the layouts of certain venues, I could see it having an impact (i.e. oh shoot, my robot isn’t past the hab line, I need to move further!).
This could be made worse by the fact that some venues have a layout where the scoreboard is more visible to one alliance than the other.
