For those who watched or were present at any scrimmage this weekend, what did you learn about LogoMotion from seeing the game actually played?
[Thanks to all the volunteers who made these scrimmages happen!]
Like every year, I realized the field is a lot bigger than I thought. I always kinda figured the poles would get in the way, but they are easily avoided. Also, the lanes don’t extend as far as you might think.
That teams have most like underestimated the importance of deployment as they focused on the speed of the minibot going up the pole when they can’t even get to the thing.
That it’s remarkably easy to get a tube past midfield by throwing, if you know the right technique.
Also, we learned that our robot is awesome.
Game pieces on the floor are hazardous obstacle courses for robots.
I will be posting two videos from the Suffield Shakedown soon.
Scrimmages are mostly for the FTAs to troubleshoot the field operating system.
Also, rookies feel better about their progress. 
In some of the videos, you will notice error codes flashing where the team numbers are usually displayed.
The tower base colors are cool.
Logos will be made. Autonomous will improve. Ubertubes will be important.
Minibots are game changers. Deployment mechanisms are crucial.
Minibots falling on the field and getting run over by the robots are, to quote Andy Grady: “Oh the moral horror!”
Midfield traffic jams and ubertubes clogging the lanes and the rack base are issues.
Defense will be an effective strategy in the midfield area.
We won’t know until week three, but I think this game will be a very good one indeed.
Figured to keep the discussion in one place.
We attended team 151’s Week Zero Event in Nashua, NH which was a great event and many thanks to team 151 and the FIRST staff. Our day was harsh but a lot was learned and I am glad it wasn’t at the regional. 4/6 matches were spent with blinking lights from radio/code problems and the two matches we did move were the only ones in which our minibot wasn’t going to work! Our team left with a lot of new thoughts on approach and have a lot to do! Even with the issues it was a great experience to get some time with the real field system and FMS.
Thoughts on the game:
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It is really hard to tell your distance from the yellow to blue or red/opponent home zone so really watch our for your location the field.
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Tubes being thrown. Since today was practice with teams testing human players I wasn’t surprised to see a ton of tubes on the field, but tubes on the field really played a difference in that most of the time teams didn’t have to travel all the way to their human player but cleaned up in the middle of the field.
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Remember the logo! You are scoring in front of you so remember that if you see a perfect logo on your rack in front of you, you have a problem!
I’m really excited to see some videos. I’ll be sure to show them to my team at tomorrow’s meeting. 
At suffield
1: top row is win or lose, literally for the final match
2: minibots are great but you have to use them well
3: even a great alliance of individuals can lose if they don’t work together to make logos, working together on the same and doing two yields more for the time than doing two separately
4: minor manipulator/arm flaws completely disable a team, use it well
and finally 5: autonomous separates the men from the boys
Smart feeders are a must.
Also, ground-pickup is near impossible unless you are picking from at the wall.
What type of gripper do you have or is this an observation?
I was at Suffield. We definitely had trouble picking up from the ground on the opposite side of the field, not much better on the close side. I also saw the same issue with most teams, both those with roller claws and every other type, it is just not that easy to align the robot on the opposite side of the field with your view of a tube blocked by your robot, the lane divider, or the tower.
Observation based on the general styles of claws, though it will be very hard for ours. The only reliable floor picker not using a wall I saw in the Suffield Shakedown stream was 88 in the video here at 1:30ish.
Most claws I saw (provided the trend continues) are going to find a hard time picking unless it’s at the walls, or possibly at the poles.
Addendum: most of the tubes found on the floor that try to be picked up are from botched high-row hangs or zealous feeders who throw the tubes in.
New point: throwing in tubes will be a bad idea unless you have a floor-picker who is reliable.
Another finding for my team: let’s paint the logo BACKWARDS on our driver station.
I was at Nashua, NH, hosted by Team 151. Couple things:
Both NH senators were there (I think I saw Sheehen there, but I may have been mistaken), as was the governor. Pretty cool. Oh, yeah, that guy in denim was there as well.
Human players were spamming the field with tubes. I don’t know why. The vast majority of them landed on the near side of the field or left the field. Very few made it all the way over. It was surprisingly unnecessary to drive to the loading station, as your opposing alliance had donated tubes to you. Our drivers were happy they didn’t have to drive very far, but I still really don’t understand the rational for tossing all your tubes to your opponents.
There were a number of successful or very nearly successful autonomous moves. The schedule was very compressed, so I suspect that many teams did not have time to revise the programming at all. I think we’ll see some strong auto play this year.
Scoring on the top row was common and surprisingly quick for some teams. Only a few were consistently going for the lower pegs, and didn’t appear to be substantially faster for it. A few logos got scored, but the emphasis seemed to be on just getting anything scored. At least one match was won through just plain numbers of tubes hung verse a genuine logo.
The tubes were extraordinarily out of ‘spec’. They were inflated on shop air, and expanded much much more then we ever were able to get with a handpump. The squares, in particular, were very distorted and difficult to hold onto in our gripper, which was designed around the 7-8 inch nominal diameter quoted in the manual. I never saw an under inflated tube- they are either at full pressure or totally deflated during the match. Some were so over filled they didn’t fit through the feeding slots. At that point it’s silly enough that the field staff really needs to address the issue if it’s still coming up in regionals.
There was a big pile of dead tubes at the end of the day. No one cause of that, they just got run over, slammed against the walls, ground up by claws etc.
I only saw a handful of minibots, and only one that was really effective. When it worked it won every match hands down. The stumbling block for teams really seems to be deployment.
Defense was very limited. I chalk this up to it being a pre-season affair, but I did see a little happening. It doesn’t take much to really slow someone down. The ‘safe zones’ don’t really get most teams much safe haven, because they frequently leave it to realign against the scoring rack. A daring team running defense could really cause some problems, but runs the risk of incurring penalties.
The towers are sensitive. During one match a robot bumped a tower during the last ten seconds, and triggered the pressure plate. No score was award for this, but it could cause some real issues.
It looks like Logomotion will be great to play and exciting to watch. I like the open field and variety of gameplay elements.
Defense will be absolutely brutal, especially if high-speed, cross-field collisions are common. I predict many tipped robots and squished grabbers.
Minibots will be very valuable commodities. Deployment is just as, if not more important than speed. A set of universally-deployable minibots could be helpful through the qualifying rounds.
A fast, reliable, inaccurate arm is better than a slow, precise one, but a good grabber is more advantageous than either.
Great comments everyone! Keep 'em coming!
-J-
Hello everyone,
Most gameplay points that I saw have already been made by others, though I don’t think you need to push a tube against a wall to pick it up. Roller claws seemed to deal with floor pickup very well.
A couple of pointers for your first week event…
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Get your minibots secure. Many times teams were penalized because minibots were just falling off of robots under normal robot movements. Even worse, sometimes those minibots were hit by big robots…not a good thing.
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Make sure all your software, firmware, etc. are up to date. Most of the delays yesterday came as a result of teams not updating to the most recent software updates. If you do this, you will raise your chances of not missing your first practice round on thursday.
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Always come to the field with a full battery. Battery voltage dips heavily as more load is placed on it. The C-Rio will reboot if battery voltage gets too low. Make sure you are always equipped with a battery that has ample voltage checked by meter (slightly over 13 volts or more is a good guideline)
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Know the rules. Many teams were getting penalized needlessly because they were doing things that were just puzzling.
These are just a few things that will make life easier on you, and on the FTA’s and staff on competition day.
Good luck to everyone!
Be conscious of how inflation level of tube effects your manipulator. At Suffield the tubes were inflated to a level I didn’t think was possible without popping them. Thankfully we built in adjustability, but I think a lot of teams may be in trouble.
I expect the problem is that most manipulators are designed to pick up from the robot side of the tube, and instead of grabbing it, they push the tube away from themselves. Ours picks up from the center, we run into the tube, drop the manipulator into the middle, and lift it up. We made the other type of claw in 2007 and had the same problems you witnessed.
It is possible. Here at Suffield Shakedwon, there were a variety of robots, including team 176. 176 just slid their arm slightly from the side & clamped down They didn’t need an immobile object to push against.