Practice field carpeting best practices

Hello all! For the first time our school has allowed our team access to a large area to setup a full field (with the stipulation that it must be torn down before each school day). We are currently attempting to find a solution to prevent the carpet from slipping and bunching while driveing that can still be easily torn down. I ask because I am hesitant to believe that the field structures alone will be sufficient to keep the carpet under tension. Thanks in advance!

Best practice is a wooden perimeter like 581 has.

OK practice Strips of gaffer’s tape around the edge. Cleans up pretty easily, sometimes pulls up floorwax with it. (Or blue painters tape, if you have plenty of student-power to make sure the scraps of blue get picked up)

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Wdym by a wooden perimeter?

A wooden structure weighing down all around the edges of your carpet (I think)

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Woud that be sufficient for competition level use? Bc us and a few other teams will be running practice matches on it.

The barrier itself might shift if a robot hits it, but it would probably hold the carpet well enough. We hold down ours with gaffers’ tape which takes longer to set up & tear down each time

You definitely want a field border for matches.

@saikiranra @AdamHeard @ShelbyA do one of you have photos of the 2x4 solution y’all have at 581? I assume there’s Velcro on all the bottom surfaces?

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Can do one better than just a photo, Adam posted the CAD a bit ago:

There is Velcro on the bottom of the walls and we use gaffers tape around the perimeter of the carpet as well.

Our set up does a great job for us and keeps everything in place well, but I don’t know that I’d recommend setting it up and tearing it down each day. We are able to leave our field up year round.

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We also have to setup and breakdown our entire field setup every day, and it’s a pain. We have 3 rolls of carpets that get us about 3/4 of a full field (missing 1 corner). While we tape the carpets together at the seems, we mainly do that because any loose strands will get sucked into the swerve drive and mean taking the wheels off to get it out, however, we don’t tape the edges because of the sheer amount of tape required to do so. Yes, the carpet slips sometimes and bunches up. We just go over to it and do that little hop and scooch motion to get it back in place and resume. Taping the edges would be better, but we’d run through tape at an alarming rate if we did that, and it’s not that bad without.

Also, the glue on the back of the carpets is going to slowly degrade, and you’re going to have to sweep up the ground where it was, because it’s going to leave behind what appears to be sand. So be ready for that.

Woud bunching, etc, not mess with auto?

Trust me, if we coud get around setup/taredown we would, but it was a requirement of the space were using.

We solved our carpet bunching by creating 4 by 8 ft carpet tiles out of OBS. We leave ours down all the time so we taped the tiles together, but our implementation was inspired by 1072’s carpet tiles, and they have a system where they can quicky set up and remove their tiles. Here are some links showing ours and their carpet tiles:
FRC 4322 2023 Build Thread - FIRST / Open Alliance - Chief Delphi
Keeping carpet from sliding and bunching - FIRST / General Forum - Chief Delphi

Yes, sometimes. When it does, we assign people to stand on the edges of the carpet near the speaker, or tape down specific corners, but taping the entire perimeter isn’t feasible. There really isn’t a good option.

We’ll usually get our driving/autos in as good a shape as possible, and then arrange to visit another team’s permanent full field setup once or twice before competition to dial it in. For many years, Code Orange had the closest available full field, and was about 1.5 hours drive away, so it certainly wasn’t a frequent trip.

Yeah… our field is going to be the only resonable option for us and local teams since we are based on the monterey peninsula (basically an island without being and island). We are also hosting a week 0 so we want our field to be as representative of a comp environment as possible.

Have you already laid the carpet out with field structures on it and tested it to know if you have a problem? I think the friction of each floor surface and the size of the carpet pieces you are rolling out will play a huge impact on whether your carpet moves or not. When we had a large enough space to layout a field, the carpet didn’t move, but the carpet pieces were large and heavy and took 4 people to lift/move with carrying straps. We could leave the field setup for the season, so we had no reason to make it more portable.

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