"Robot Access Periods"

FIRST General Forum
1

This thread is to ask about and discuss use of the Robot Access Periods unique to teams attending 2-day events (District Events)… The 2014 Administrative Manual was just released, confirming that they will continue into 2014, maintaining the 6-hour limit.

As a team that’ll be competing under the District System for the first time, I have some questions of my own…

How do the rules for a “withholding allowance” relate to the rules for the “Robot Access Periods?” (i.e. Can you choose to use part of your witholding allowance in one of your robot access periods rather than at the event?)

What does your team usually do during the “Robot Access Periods?”

Do you build a practice robot anyway?

2

During our Robot Access Periods last year we mainly focused on autonomous testing.

The six hours before each competition gave me enough time to improve our autonomous routines, turning our 4ish disk autonomous at Hatboro to consistent six disk autonomous at TCNJ.

We did not have a practice robot so this time was very important for us. If we had a practice robot I could have improved the autonomous even more. A six hour window doesn’t seem to justify not building a practice robot, although it certainly helps teams that do not. Your team should probably build one anyway if you can.

I’m not sure how the withholding allowance rules work. They seemed somewhat vague. We didn’t make any physical changes to our robot during the access periods for those rules to affect us. I would like some more clarification on this.

3

I will be 100% honest: I have yet to go through a robot access period (as most teams in New England and PNW can attest) and even I have been sketchy on the rule the whole time since it never applied to us.

That being said, from a big picture perspective, I see it as the old “Thursday” for Regionals (Man, that sounded weird) sans inspection (which is now the night before the District Event) and practice matches. Do what you need to do in your 6 hours to be ready for the event.

Since we are Week 3 (WPI) and Week 4 (Bryant University), I would consider re-approaching our mechanism if need be. I hope to be very modular with our mechanism if we decide “we’ll go this way, but if it doesn’t work, we can try the other”, and making sure Auto works as best you can make sure it works at your build facility.

4

As being from Michigan and having dealt with the District Event Model for a long time now I can tell you there is a big distinction between “Robot Access Period” and “30lb Withholding Allowance”. A “Robot Access Period” is a 6 hour period between events that allows you to open the bag and work on the robot as a whole and fine tune/fix anything you need to do, also this time can only be used in the 7 days leading up to an event your team is registered in and does not have to be used in one whole day, it can be split up into multiple days as long as it only equals 6 total hours.

As for the “30lb Withholding Allowance” what this means is that you can withhold any 30lbs from your robot on stop build day and work on it freely. An example would be that last year my team chose to use this on our shooting mechanism so it would be ready for competition.

If this didn’t clear this up for you please feel free to message me and I’ll clear anything up for you.

5

Nathan,
Several teams in Michigan still build practice robots, though several have found that the access periods and competition are sufficient to be competitive. It depends how much time you plan on practicing. In theory with the access window of 6 hours with no session allowing for less than 2 hours, you get 1-3 robot level working sessions.
If you plan out the sessions and have someone paying attention to the clock, you can achieve a lot in those sessions. If you are organized, and plan well, then the “need” for a practice bot begins becoming a diminishing return situation.
If you are used to doing a practice bot, I would recommend doing one again and then evaluate at the end of season whether you should do one in the future.

6

Practice Bot
We still build a practice robot. Our first year doing so was the year before MAR districts, and we’ve continued now for two more. Unless you currently get less than 12 hours of use out of your practice bot, the access window doesn’t change much. It really is just replacing that Thursday (usually) of regionals. Also consider that you play a lot more in the district system, and every event counts.* Your robot is in for a workout basically unheard of outside of districts, with 12 quals per event and 3 events before Worlds. (Perspective: we broke 100 matches with like 4 off-seasons to go.) This also means that teams end up with much less time between matches than they’re used to at regionals. We like our practice bot just because it takes some of the wear & tear and serves as a test bed for practicing quick pit fixes.

Access Periods
We’ve done everything we do on Regional Thursdays. Testing, installing upgrades, fixing issues from the last district, etc. You can do a lot if you get stay organized.

Withholding Allowance
To clarify further, at least last year, the withholding allowance for a given event applied throughout of the access period for that event as well as the on-site competition. So you can put on, say, [29] new pounds during unbag and [1] on during Day 0 (or 1, or 2)–or any other split, so long as it totals the max. So, for instance, there’s nothing so sketchy as opening the bag with one robot and closing it around another. This was clarified somewhere official at the time, but unfortunately all the links I’ve found point to blank 2014 pages.

*Meaning that one great elim run won’t get you to Worlds; you at least need to get to District Champs first, even if you win there rather than qualify for Worlds on points.

7

Are we safe in assuming that it would be alright to re-manufacture a piece of our robot (we had our arm bent during our first competition) as part of this “withholding” and then insert and reattach it during that 6 hour period?

thanks for your replies,

8

My team, being in Michigan, builds a practice bot every year, and do programming work and driver practice with it after bag. Inevitably we have to make changes to the practice bot as we discover faults or problems during practice. We use our six hour access period to implement these changes to the competition bot, as well as test autonomus mode on it. The combination of practice bot + robot access time is extremely helpful for us because we can find the issues and have fixes ready before we unbag, implement them quickly, and have some time left over for practice/testing. This saves us from spending the first day at a District competition discovering issues and trying to fix them on the fly. Regarding the withholding allowance, we usually take a few mechanisms off of our practice bot or just manufacture some extra parts and bring them to competition with us as our allowance.

9

In my limited experience, the 6 hours of unbag time in your shop is infinitely more productive than a similar amount of time at a regular event, because you can develop a plan, execute it without waiting on other teams, and bag again when you finish. (Trying to actually get anything productive done at events like CMP is ridiculous)

You get up to 3 robot access periods, and the minimum time consumed for unbagging is 30 minutes (i.e. if you unbag for 5 minutes, that counts as 30 minutes; but if you unbag for 43 minutes it counts as 43 minutes and is not rounded up), the total time for these 3 unbags (plus any time wasted when unbagging for < 30 minutes) must be less than 6 hours.

When you bag or unbag, you always need a non-student adult to sign the bag’n’tag form; just as is done on stop build day, and at events.

5.6.2 ‘Robot Access Period’ - Schedule

Teams may unlock their robot for a total of 6 hours during the 7-day period preceding any two-day event in which their team will be competing with their robot. The 6 hours may be broken up in any way the team wishes, with the exception that** no single access period may be shorter than 30 minutes** and the team may not have more than** 3 access periods** prior to each event. The robot must be locked up in between sessions and** this must be documented on the Robot Lock-Up Form each time**.

You can treat your unbag period as you would treat your robot at an event. You can use a static 45lbs of pre-fabricated materials to improve your robot while unbagged, however anything you use does count towards your total that you bring to the event. (i.e, if you left off a 45lb catapult, you can’t bring any spare parts to the event, even if you put the catapult on the robot during your unbag time). If you fabricate something during the unbag period, it is the same as doing so at the competition, and doesn’t count towards your limit.

Anything you take off your robot during an access period, which isn’t replaced during the same access period, becomes part of your 45lb allowance. You cannot split your robot in half, bag half-A and work on half-B, then unbag half-A and put half-B into the bag and work on half-A.

R18:

…
For Teams attending 2-Day Events, these FABRICATED ITEMS may be used during the Robot Access Period and/or brought to the Event, but the total weight may not exceed 45 lbs. FABRICATED ITEMS constructed during the Robot Access Period and bagged with the ROBOT are exempt from this limit.
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