Hey, I’m on team 3620, and there’s something that happened at world’s that I keep thinking about. In qualification match 91 (on Roebling), we successfully made a traversal climb. Then at the last second, 5895 Peddie Robotics’ climber hook caught on our bumper, negating our climb points. I’m just curious how other people reacted when it happened, especially members of team 5895.
match video: Qualification 91 - 2022 FIRST Championship - Roebling Division - YouTube
Personally I’ve been mocking @scottandme mercilessly since then.
We had similar things happen at both MSC and Champs (costing us a climb RP+win at least once). It happens, but I wish the climb rules could be different to prevent missed climbs like this from happening when the bot clearly completed the climbing task.
I’ve had the privilege to work with Peddie many times over the past few years. I am confident they were just as mad as you guys were. You can even see their drive coach’s reaction to what happened in the video when he puts his head down.
5895 is one of the best (or maybe just straight up the best) embodiments of strategy and smart decision making in the FMA district; from robot design all the way through in-match decision making. That was highly uncharacteristic of them, and I’m sure they hated that it happened more than anyone.
Yeah IMO teams don’t do this intentionally, nobody wants to miss points.
Ideally the rules would be written/interpreted so cases like this wouldn’t de-score climbs.
Pretty much what everyone already posted, you could probably check with your drive team, or DM someone on our team/email our team if you wanted more information. But I’ll post it here since the insinuation was that we blew a climb on purpose (or something, I can’t really tell what you’re getting at).
AFAIR the plan was for our other partner to climb for 6 points (so 15+6 for the climb RP), and we play cargo cleanup to stay out of the way. Apparently there was a late audible for some reason and we needed to climb, since our 3rd wasn’t heading to the bar.
Pretty clear in the video that we rush to the bar with ~5ish seconds left. Your robot is right in the line of sight for our drive team (another reason why we were generally happy to leave climbs to the other two robots), and in that scramble our driver pulls forwards before our climber is at the correct height. Our climber was a single button “hold to deploy” and when we release the button our robot climbs automatically. Unfortunately we couldn’t see that we drove past the bar, our driver let go of the button, and we do a half-pullup on your bumpers. We apologized for the missed climb/pull-up after the match - thankfully it didn’t seem to cause any damage to your robot.
Really, There could be incentives to not climb or botch a climb in some cases.
Not in this case, bit it could happen.
While not exactly the same as your situation.
In Match 71 on Roebling, we thought we were supposed to get 40 climb points. They negated our partners climb from a Traversal to a High (the robot in front of us).
Not sure why we didnt get it. Our robot settled right after the buzzer rang where both of our bumpers were side to side next to each other.
When we questioned it, the refs had talked to each other and said they would change it. It never happened. Not that it really matters, but just wondering why it was initially ruled not 40 points. We had this happen at other events a couple times and received the full 40.
Actually, another match similar to that was 96. You might remember, they got all bots on the traversal, but they only got points for 2 traversals. My assumption was that they also didn’t get them because the bumpers were touching.
I’m curious how the climbs were counted in match 96. The video got cut off (and I couldn’t find it on Twitch) but it sounded like announcer started to explain that one of the climbs did not count due to ‘referee discretion’. 3539 did not get credited with the climb, which is interesting since they are extremely likely touching 3310, which should discredit that climb as well. That climbing ranking point determined the top seed.
IMO, these instances should count in the spirit of the rules for climbing and traversing.
That had to be just incorrectly entered IMO. I can’t imagine what interpretation would say that was HHT, should have been HTT.
Let me start off by apologizing for what happened, and also take a second to point out how awesome of a team 3620 is to interact with. Immediately prior to the match taking place, I would have listed my interactions with your team - specifically your coach - as being one of the best I had at the Championship.
That being said, what you saw happen in the end of that match was largely our fault - or at least, I (personally) have no issue owning that one.
To provide a bit of background context - our entire season was based on the strategy of us being “The last one up” - we played the floor until the last possible second, then finding our way onto the bar as needed - doing this typically resulted in climbers having a higher probability of success when playing with us since they were often free to stop scoring cargo much earlier as we nearly always locked the Cargo RP on our own.
The above being said - match strategy here was a bit of a mess, due to a miscommunication about who was running the 5 ball auto, who was running a (2) and who was running a (1) ball auto. Thankfully 3620 was willing to take the less glamourous role in the match and run the (1) ball, but nearly all of our pre-match strategy had been focused on auto - and we didn’t have a good teleop plan. If you watch the match again, you’ll notice that - as an alliance - we did a really, really bad job of prioritizing field zones and offensive priorities, considering how many shots were taken by the (3) robots, there wasn’t a lot of cargo scored. I counted at least 5 shots that were missed either due to rushed driving (on us) or just bad communication across the board.
With all of that being said, you’ll notice that we (as an Alliance) were sort of caught out at the end game, we (5895) weren’t planning to climb, assuming that 3620 was traversing, with the 3rd robot being the remaining climb for the RP. In the end, the call was made that we were missing climb points, so you notice that our robot tries to do a full field dash through/around a defender and to make it onto the bar right as 3620 completed their traversal and shook the glass.
Anecdotally, and after watching the video, I believe Scott’s Assessment is correct and our driver accidentally flinched and/or lost site of the robot/and or accidentally let go of the button when the glass shook. After that, our climb is fast enough that it was difficult for us to react to it in real time.
This was probably the match that sticks in my mind the most from this season, just because it was so far outside of our normal performance window. Not only did we not hit our performance objectives, but we prevented our partners from performing their best as well. I spoke with our kids at length about this afterwards, and we learned some valuable lessons in the process - though after ~16 years of this, really all I have to say is “Sometimes, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
As Scott said, feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further, or if there’s something that I said that you disagree with or is otherwise inaccurate, or if there’s anything you’d rather not say publicly.
(Double Replying because I want this to be separate from my previous post)
The rules regarding the qualification for a climb could be much clearer, in previous years, the verbiage “supported by” was often used, in a quick rules check I see that this is no longer the case, and thus opens us up to situations like this. If we play the “Supported by” game - then 3620 was in no way supported by anything other than the bar, and if anything we were supported by 3620.
I understand that there is a rule preventing one robot from climbing off of another, but the fact that a robot that is clearly in a legal climbing position can have their climb invalidated by a robot in contact with them who is not legally climbed is - dumb? - at best.
They intended for that to be the final outcome. Match play was stopped where the head ref walked over to the side ref that called it, after my student went to the question box.
I’m wondering that for all of these calls for other matches, interpretation was similar due to the same volunteer watching the climbs and inputting them nearest to the rungs.
We had switched out climber arms and had overextended when we first got in there, thus negating our climb:(
Based on what other people said on this thread and what I saw from you guys in Houston, that was definitely not a typical performance for you guys. You play really well, and I also have respect for your “last one up”. Thank you to you and @scottandme for bringing some more context to the situation, I really appreciate it (our drive team didn’t give any of this information). I look forward to seeing Peddie next year.
How to interpret a legal climb has been the source of a lot of consternation in several other FIRST games that I have been involved in. The most memorable for me was the FTC game Res-Q where there was a cross bar on the field climbing structure such that when you were hanging from the top bar it was virtually impossible not to be resting against this lower cross bar. At one point during the season the official ruling was that if “any weight” was supported by that crossbar, the climb would not count. By the time the super-regionals and Worlds rolled around, the official technique to judge a climb was a “swing test” where the ref would push the robot away from that lower bar with their hand and see if the robot would remain supported by the upper bar when they let go. It was a bit silly at times.
You would think with climbing being such a common feature in FIRST games, that there would be more thought given to how to judge a climb and determine if the robot had completed the task or not. Maybe the idea that if a robot on the ground is contacting a robot that has climbed it negates the climb is an intentional aspect of the game rules (in order to force teams to think more strategically, understand the rules and work together to ensure that the climbs are coordinated and not negated). This does not feel right to me, but maybe that is the case.
I feel that park points from 2018-2020 ran counter to this, as they encouraged everyone to go chill in the climbing zone at the end of the match. The move away from them this year may have been an effort to reduce negated climbs (though oddly teams sitting in the hangar without a climb remained a common sight).
I think the rule is just a result of the GDC trying to keep it as objective as possible. I can’t think of a rule that would allow inconsequential contact without introducing creating a judgement call for the ref that needs to interpret said contact. There’s certainly an argument to be had that such a thing would be better than the current situation, but I’m not surprised the GDC wants to protect refs wherever possible from making decisions that could make or break seasons for teams.