Framerate on the driver’s station from the camera can be pretty poor. It’ll matter a lot.
Even in 2007, at least one team started out by placing tubes on their opponent’s side of the rack. You get decent vision, they get obstacles, and that’s with the tubes 20 feet away!
This is really important anyone have any response? How clear is the glass and can the whole rack be seen from the driverstation? If you know my my goal, you can infer what I am going to do.
Especially with the middle level being so “accessible” of a height for many of the robots, and that is where many of the visibility problems will likely occur. While the webcam is nice, I think this is where the analyst will be a bigger part.
Here is a photo from the driver station. I wanted to get more but I had to get out of there. It wasn’t too bad, once the row had 6 tubes all across it, seeing was an issue. It will come down to strategy as the middle will probably get scored on last.
You can also check out more pictures on my stream as well from Manchester.
Screen’s blocked too, if there’s anything on the high rows. Pretty much, visibility is best and score is worst when bottom row is filled, and visibility is worse but score is better when the upper rows are filled. Completely aside from the fact that camera operators just love stationary robots that aren’t your fast-moving one.
Honestly based on what I have seen while the visibility is impeded particularly when the scoring pieces are scored on the middle row. There is in fact some large “pockets” for the drive team to see through. Ofcourse we are only talking about the left and right team as the middle team is not impeded at all. But how is this any different from any other year? As a coach that has the honor of leading his team on the field I know that visibility is often impeded every year. Last year right in front of the driver station as well as behind the humps. 2009 was just confusing hahaha robots impeding others it was a mess. 2008 with the divide in the middle and the glare it caused, cut off almost an entire 1/4 of the field from your vision. 2007 had its difficulties and on and on and on. The GDC knows exactly what it is doing and they do these things on purpose. I will personally enjoy this added complexity and I think we will all discover the work arounds.