There is lots of good discussion in the IRI time limits thread. FIRST’s adjustments of the playoff tournament structure have been largely positive with the consistent structure of the double elimination tournament and the longer timeouts.
What are some other ways we can restructure our approach to events to improve the team / audience / event experience? (Recognizing some people may not agree with these, I believe that most people attending robotics events for their entirety want to see more robots operating, less idle time, and less event buildup, so this is how we structure our event.)
Some time savers / quality of life improvements we have executed at our offseason:
Very short opening ceremonies (5 min)
Hold the driver’s meeting somewhere that is not the field, then teams can use the field for camera calibration / measurement during that time
If the field is functional, leave it open as long as the venue is open for tethered practice or extended practice match time
Do the handshake before F1 during the timeout, or skip it
FTAFIRST Technical Advisor(A) available–the FTAFIRST Technical Advisor is at the driver’s meeting. FTAAs can cover, if there are any available.
Holding the driver’s meeting not on the field is actually reasonable practice; bleachers tend to work well. Sometimes you need to explain stuff visually.
On the second point, the field does generally need maintenance at the end of the day. I would consider it unlikely that it is functional enough to use for practice safely. I could be wrong on that. If it’s inconsistent, that leads to “issues”. Any RIRobot Inspector can tell you how much they’d earn if they had a dollar for every time someone says “but Event X…”
Already a thing. If the teams show up early, we go.
I have yet to see all 6 teams on the field much before the field timeout ends.
Drive teams are often working on their robots with the pit crew. If this is done I would suggest doing it right after M13 (before any awards) rather than right before F1.
Extensive debate on this… particularly if an F3 match is required. In regionals, wildcards aren’t determined yet so can’t be announced–they’re usually the very last things announced anyways.
Personally, I’d make an adjustment to the match cycle times. Recognizing that we all want as many matches as possible, I’d plan for an average 8-9-minute cycle (current target is generally around 7 minutes) wherever possible, with a couple of strategically-placed 10-minute or 20-minute breaks. Yes, this is likely to reduce the number of matches by one or two–but, it will help hold the matches into their scheduled time. There’s enough field issues to eat up a lot of that time, but if we recognize that they happen and build time in, then the field gremlins tend to take part of the day off. Nothing like ending 10 minutes early and putting that time towards selections.
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but in the post-bag FRC, I don’t think a full day of pit time and practice matches are needed for regional events, especially late in the season. Many ideas in this thread and the IRI alliance selection thread are great, but we are talking about shaving 1-2 minutes here and there. Regionals schedules have 14 hours set aside for load in, pit time, practice matches and inspection.
Representative only for second award at that event? That season? For non judged awards (eg Finalist/Winner) ?
Not sure I like it but it avoids the problem of the 150 person team that wins the event and EI so we have to spend 20 minutes while they shuffle through twice.
This is BIG. I also thought maybe you schedule each team to allow them to have 10 mins tethered on the real field to test autonomous routines like on load-in day.
You and I both know that any sort of “2nd award” logistics aren’t going to happen.
A related time-saver is bringing down finalist and winning teams immediately after finals - the machinery backstage takes time to process before announcing the rest of awards so let’s fill that deadtime with the 6-8 team medal handout.
A “long” celebration of these students isn’t really a problem imo. I remember it being pretty inspirational to me as a student seeing those sorts of teams win like that and being celebrated in that way, and it still is. Love seeing all the kids recognized in that way and not get bogged down in what might be inter-team politics.
The first long celebration isn’t a problem for me. The second one feels… less useful. Back in the Friday awards days it was possible to have a single team win 4 distinct awards. Meaning it was possible, over 2 days, to spend upwards of 30 minutes clapping for a single team. (Friday awards were not deconflicted with Saturday awards, so, any Friday award + Safety + Winner/Finalist + EI/Chairmans)
I’m still on team remove the dang politicians stumping for re-election from the schedule.
But I’m also on team “events as they currently exist poorly serve the stated goals of FIRST and we need a radical reimagining of the concept” soooo…
With the movement of the awards into the timeout of the playoffs, the best time optimization first could do at this point is to upgrade the field communication systems. Events that didn’t have any time just waiting for the field/laptops/robots to connection to each other would likely save more time than any of the options talked above.
What upgrades do you have in mind that would help? For instance, a lot of people have been looking for wireless routers that boot in less than the current ~60s, and haven’t had much luck that I’m aware of.
The majority of delays I saw this season were from teams powering on late, forgetting to plug something in, or difficulties with getting dashboards to come up. I’m not sure a control system upgrade would solve any of those.
While it’s a bit out of scope of this thread, I think the communication systems need a full upgrade not just a new faster radio.
As such my off hand ideas would be to have the robots and laptop connect to the field a match earlier (while in queue) to allow both the radios and laptops to be booted up and connected before getting on the field. To support that get rid of RJ45 connections for laptops and have some sort of USB wifi dongle for field connection. Another idea would be to have a driver station that didn’t require windows, allowing for quicker booting OS (specifically ChromeOS) to used for laptops.
We would still have instances of late teams or teams that just forget something but stuff like this would eliminate some of the issues I have seen arise on the field.
It is getting harder and harder to find laptops with an ethernet port without shelling out extra money. Teams already have to use USB-C ports with a dongle so it would be nice if the field had a standard USB adapter to rule out one extra piece of hardware issues.
Totally fair, now tell that to cheap laptop makers, as I loan out at least 1 USB to RJ45 Connector per event, so we still have to deal with USB networking.
Also the goal I had was having the connection done before the team even walked up to the driver station.
Plus the ethernet ports can wear out quickly, causing the connection to be unstable or unsecure. Having it be usb c or something more robust would be great.
Funny… back when I was a student we used 900MHz radios. You could turn the robot on, walk off the field, and start driving as soon as you could enable the robot.
I’m not saying that we should to back to that technology, but I want that kind of radio boot time. When you can tell what failed by how long the robot is out, and the radio knocks it out for 60 seconds… RIO is only 30 seconds. We’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor worry about that one later.