Week 5 Impressions of the Rack. The Conclusion of the Games.

FIRST General Forum
1

As the last regional of the season has passed, everyone is reflecting on what they did and how they can do better.

So what did you love about the game? What did you hate about the game? What did you think about the autonomous modes and about keepers? How has the game challenged you and questioned your personal abilities? What about the presentation of the game and the lack of web casts available? Was this a “FAIR” game, meaning that every team, no matter what resources had the same chance at being key in this game? What were the keys to victorious teams and what did they have in common?

On a scale of 1-10 how did FIRST do at the regionals? Do you think they were ready this year as opposed to previous years when it came to spare parts, assistances, organization, etc.? What about the algorithm they used to determine who was paired with whom for the qualifying matches? What are your thoughts on the kit of parts and how they dramatically impacted the game this year sparking controversy after controversy and some [mild] flaming on these forums? How about IFI? Did they present themselves well this year as opposed to previous years and how did their support when you were down help you? Did the new update they did at your first regional help you? … and the much dreaded question… How did you react to the BaneBots support* you received and how could ANYONE, improve upon it?

How about Atlanta? Some of the best bots in the WORLD will be competing for their chance to go to Einstein and if not a victory. What do you think it takes to win at Atlanta compared to regionals and how do you think this difference in setting play out? Atlanta has a different vibe and has a different feel about it, and do you think it will take the rookies a bit of time to “Get it” before they realize Atlanta is just a “fancy” regional?

Thoughts, Comments, Questions? Discuss.

Pavan.

*I want a nice clean discussion please.

2

IMO I believe they need to find the balance on autonomous. It should count for more this year, last year Aim High rewarded autonomous a little too much.

3

When it comes to the regionals, they worked very well. There were very few stops and pauses and problems this year than there were other years and if there were problems they got fixed up very quickly.

While this years game isn’t Aim High, it is a game with a competitive spirit and is going to be remembered very well: either by scars of defeat or a battleworn trophy.

My only hope is that the Final matches at Nationals are more offense than defense…though probably not going to happen.

4

This game turned out to be a lot more than I ever expected at kickoff and I ended up being very pleased with it. The only negative I see with the game this year was the very few guaranteed points for all the work that went into auton (I know, the keeper could end up being #6 in a row, however, a spoiler can easily take away the gains of the keeper). This game would have been much better if the keeper also acted as a doubler for the rack score.

Given all the controversy over the match pairings, week one left out of this discussion, I believe that FIRST came up with a good algorithm. The finals were not just a mix up of the top twenty four ranked teams. If you were top eight, you really had to do your homework to come up with a quality alliance. At the West Michigan Regional there were no teams that ended up getting there first pick out of the top eight. For me at least, this was the first time I ever saw that happen.

Hats off to IFI! I went to two regionals and watched many webcast, the only foghorn I heard was at West Michigan when the diamond plate came off the end of the spider leg and they stopped the match for field damage. The volunteers did a magnificent job this year as always.

Atlanta will be defensive, those few auton scores will make a difference there. With all the unfamiliar teams the matches will start out a little more offensive until teams are able to figure out who can score and then watch out for defense. There have been several post about the hybrids. IMO in Atlanta the hybrids will be very much in demand. A few top scorers are able to score while defended, just not nearly as fast as when they are not defended. A robot that can successfully help an alliance get sixty bonus points will be an important alli especially if they can also score ringers. I have seen good hybrids able to score four, five, six or more ringers and still have a successful deploy.

Good Luck To All!

5

As a whole I think FIRST did very well this season. The field control system ran very smoothly (better than I’ve ever seen), and aside from a flaw in the initial design of the matching algorithm there have been no problems with any of the software this year.

It’s interesting that the number of ramp and arm bots at a competition can affect that drastically what the winning strategy is; in the past the types of robots determined offense vs. defense, but nothing on the scale of what has happened this year.

Atlanta will certainly be interesting; I hope there’s alot offense, but who knows what will happen.

6

I think that the matches went very quickly. I didn’t see many field failures and that made the regionals seem to go by quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing Atlanta because I didn’t get so see as many regionals as I had originally planned due to school work. From what I heard from family who came to the regional, they said it was hard to keep up with and understand.

7

Everything went smoothly…had a great time. Rack n’ Roll is incredibly fun - I originally didn’t quite like it at kickoff, but once we got to regionals, I got to see how much fun it really is. 321 did really well this year, but we got bumped down too much on the last day of competition, one loss due to a spoiler, and 2 DQ’s, one from our human player, the other was from our claw, because we were rammed when human loading.

I still think that Rack n’ Roll is a bit confusing. After the final buzzer for some matches, it was hard to tell if we won or not. Some kids from school said it was hard to follow, meaning you had to think too much when watching it. Aim High was very straight forward, just score points, and whoever scored the most wins.

8

One problem I had at GLR was on thursday they were ahead of schedual by a lot, and there was no calls to the fields for one of our matchs! We showed up at the field only to find that it was already lunch time. The real problem was that the annoucements to the gym pit area wasnt working for some time.

9

The intermittent radio problems that could not be resolved had a big impact in Florida. I have heard speculation that it may have been due to radio communication of the construction crews involved with building the new arena. If we have an exciting super regional next year with no outdoor pits, I guess we can chalk this year’s radio problems up to some growing pains!

10

That’s interesting, because I think the exact opposite. It seemed like in aim high, people just stared dumbly at the field, and no one had any idea what was going on until they displayed the final scores on the screen. I thought rack and roll was interesting in that it was very visual and you could really follow it. There were several tense games when it came down to whether a robot or two could be lifted to win in the last couple seconds. Overall, I really liked this years game.

As for the alliance algorithm, I hated it! We are a low numbered team (624), yet we are actually a lifter, were a double forklift. So we seemed to consistently be stuck with a couple bad alliance partners, just cycling through them, and always facing off against the same couple power teams over and over. And since were a lifter, we only facilitate other people scoring. Being stuck with two rookie teams almost every match really knocks down your score. It seemed like we were being punished for being a veteran team and making a facilitative robot. I’d much rather have completely random matches, short turn-around times and all.

11

The field control system should be kept. It’s the best they’ve had yet, and if the scores were sometimes slow, I think that may have partly been humans trying to input the score. The auto pause was a needed addition. The one annoyance was the pairing algorithm. (And that wasn’t too bad for us at our regionals.)

The issues that came up during build were handled promptly and professionally, and those were some “new equipment” issues. I haven’t heard much about those since about Week 3 or before.

My personal pet peeve is the mid-season changes to rules (or lack thereof). There were only two of them, but they affected teams. One was rescinded, the other was in reaction to a strategy that had already won a match (or was it a regional??) However, a clear definition was needed and was not provided. Those are the main failings in the rules/updates this year. And, considering that very few rules were in need of updating, I would rate the rulebook a solid 8-9 on content/clarity and a 5 in thinness. (Starting to be too many rules for most people, but 90% or more of those rules are needed.)

Overall, I’d give FIRST a 9/10 for this year. Most of the few issues were resolved quickly, and the rest were made livable.

Atlanta–I withold judgement until the evening of the 13th, or maybe later.:wink:

12

I gotta say that at Kickoff I was NOT impressed with this year’s challenge. It’s 2005 over again, I thought…

Well, it’s no Aim High, but it’s grown on me. Still, there were a lot of things that FIRST could have (and should have) known were going to happen that they should have rectified.

  1. Autonomous is not a big part of the game. Yes, it’s cool if you can do it, and potentially that keeper doubles your row, but the challenge was rather tough (rotating and translating the rack?!), leaving younger teams (and veteran teams who didn’t have the time) in the dirt. And that one tube seldom decided the match. I’m of the opinion that only autonomous mode is truly robotics - make it have a big impact (and allow for dead reckoning to some extent)!

  2. Too much action in the middle of the field. I liked Aim High and Triple Play because robots were constantly all over the place. Perhaps another place to score other than right in the center?

  3. PENALTIES! No one likes it when matches are decided by penalties. The yellow/red card fiasco was luckily judiciously used, but even so too many matches were left to the refs. Penalties should be for SAFETY and for COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES. Things like making a fallen robot violate the 72" rule can suck all the fun out of a match, and it adds insult to injury.

All the same, once teams got better and the scores got higher, the penalties became less of an issue.

But still - I just didn’t get that visceral feeling of excitement from hanging innertubes that I got from shooting things. Or lifting way bigger and heavier things. Or doing a robot chin up. Or blasting through a wall of crates. Etc.

FIRST gets a 6/10 from me.

13

Okay…

Autonomous
It has the potential to be effective. This game is about speed and what’s better than using the first 15 seconds of the game to score when your opponents might not be scoring?
However, it’s a very difficult challenge for something that isn’t really worth a whole lot.

Gameplay
Overall, the matches were intense. There were many possibilities as to how a team could play the game. There is still a lot of defense, which gets annoying for those who can actually score, but the fact that there is a giant structure in the way makes for some clean defense since there isn’t as much room to pick up speed.
Some of the rules were rediculous. The 72"x72" was my least favorite from day one.
Also, I think teams should not be allowed to pass tubes directly to their robots over the alliance station wall. It pretty much eliminates the use of the chute. If you want tubes to be handed directly to the robot, design it to grab from the chute. I don’t mind if a team holds their gripper close to the alliance station wall and sort of throws the tube on as long as the human player and the robot aren’t touching the tube simultaniously.
There was no incentive to score on the top level. It takes longer to score up top (depending on where you get the tubes, most teams picked up from the floor).

Endgame
The lifting was too large of a bonus. With the swinging rack and unpredictable properties of the tubes, defense was very easy. Lifting wasn’t too difficult either. It’s no fun to watch teams play merciless defense the whole match and end the game by having both robots lifted 12". This is just like the King of the Hill from 2003, only less violent.

What I do like about this game is that you can’t win alone. Unlike last year, if you had one strong robot and two duds, the alliance can still win. This year, one strong robot can’t carry the weight of the two duds with the immense amount of defense being played.

I’ll be blunt. Rack and Roll is a stupid name. It gets a 7/10

As far as FIRST goes…

Radio issues
Wrong parts in the kit? We got the wrong FP motors
Stupid rules. 72x72, power distribution block, etc.
Radio issues
Pairing algorithm, we’ve all heard it before
We are not going back to Banebots for parts. The encoders were a poor quality, the carrier plate problem speaks for itself, they were very pricey, the CIM motors required a home-made part to support them well.
Radio issues

Some of the rules made halfway through the year were kind of intense. Nothing quite like telling the teams who payed to have their machines shipped that they now can’t use them in their pits. A drill press is actually safer than hand drill. A band saw is actually safer than a Sawz-all.

The entering and exiting the pit at GSR was painful. There were two entrances closely guarded by volunteers who keep an eye open for anyone without safety glasses. Those people are sorted into two categories.

  1. Those who do not have them at all
  2. Those who have them on their person, but have them in their pocket, or their purse, or bag, or whatever they use to carry them in.

The first one is okay, they just hand that person a pair of safety glasses. The second one, however, stands in the middle of the aisle blocking the path for those who didn’t even take off their safety glasses when they left the pit and are now trying to re-enter the pit while they search for their own glasses. I say this is a fire hazard if there ever was one.

The people without safety glasses should be sent to another entrance where there is a bucket of safety glasses. This would mean no congestion at the entrances and an extra set of entrances incase there were an emergency and everyone needed to get out.

I’ll stop there…

14

Gosh, lots of questions here. Let’s see.

First impression at game unveiling “This is a walk through the cake.” Not the “they expect us to do WHAT!?!” that I have felt in previous years. I prefer the latter.

I think the challenge was a little bit too easy, and not NEARLY enough teams completed to NEARLY a high enough degree of success. Over two regionals, I observed no more than about a dozen teams that really “got it” Picking up and placing that tube is NOT a difficult thing to do. I’m not sure why more teams didn’t do it. And it’s not just that, it’s that if they chose not to play with tubes, their ramps often didn’t work either. :frowning:

Autonomous mode - It didn’t work. Need more incentive.

Regionals - much better run this year than last (for the one I can compare) and for the other one I went to for the first time it was very well run too. I liked the fact that the FIRST volunteers and/or staff/crew/etc seemed very approachable and very willing to listen to people for the most part. I can recall years when this was not the case.

The kit of parts - FIRST is not supposed to be easy. But the challenge isn’t supposed to be fixing defective components. I feel this years kit of parts was a downgrade in the drive system department from years past. 2005 and 2006, you could have a 4 motor 4wd robot straight from the kit of parts. This year, you had to spend more money to get that (dual motor adapter, or more gearboxes. On the BaneBots issue, I think it is something that could have been completely avoided, with proper engineering and proper testing procedure. While those gearboxes are a good value, they just aren’t robust enough for many teams, and I’m not confident it was the right move going to them. You know what I say? Don’t give us a gearbox at all. Shoot, don’t even give us wheels. Let the students learn something by building their own. If the robots cease to move, so be it. The “kit bot” has taken away a lot of the “sparkle” I think we used to have in FIRST. The goal of providing a driving chassis was to get teams to build better manipulators or whatever, but clearly, that hasn’t happened (at least not this year, imho). I really enjoyed this year reading “how are we supposed to attach the sprocket to the wheel, there were no screws in the kit” It is called a hardware store my friends. FIGURE IT OUT! Not to be rude but if you can’t figure out stuff like this perhaps you need to consider FVC. This is the big leagues. FRC teams need at least one person on there who knows how to assemble things, use tools, and fabricate things, in order to get something beneficial out of this program (imho).

So, the bottom line is, I think the parts that are given to us need to function as intended, but the robot should not be handed to us on a silver platter.

The Game - I feel this is a very fair game, although I’m not convinced it should be.

Victorious teams thought about their robots with a logical and realistic design process, built them to the specs of this well thought out design. The victorious robots were not “slapped together” nor were they designed fully and built poorly. Victorious teams cleansed and called upon their “crystal ball” in week one and did not design robots beyon their means to build them (this is a big problem I see).

Pairing alrgorithm It has its upsides. But, there are too many teams that never get to play with too many teams. I don’t like that.

And one last note on the KOP, that robot radio has got to change. I know the component got discontinued or whatever but that thing is too big, and I miss the small rubber antenna. And finally, as I’m sure most of us would agree, that rockwell block has to go, or at least the absurd requirement to use it does. I’m more in fear of robots catching fire this year than I ever had been before. I never have to retighten any of the bolts I design in anywhere on the robot. It is rediculous to think it is normal procedure to retighten the screws in that thing. The rockwell block is like driving from florida to new york by going through Colorado. There just is no point. (nothing against Colorado)

15

My Feelings after attending Four Regionals and watching a fifth

  1. The match system is to janky to work on any consistent basis. The idea that low numbered teams are inherently better than higher number teams is bogus. With the ways teams are mentoring rookie teams now, rookies and second year teams are better than they were in the past. I don’t think Exploding Bacon needs any help winning matches.

  2. For me, the game has gone from really boring in week one (VCU Webcast), really exciting week two (GLR), To defensive Week three (DET), Boring again week four (BUCK), and amazingly awesome week Five (WMR).

  3. This has been debated to death, but Ramps are vital to every alliance. At every regional I have seen, the winning alliance had ramps and used them to win. The bonus points are higher and more important than Aim High and Triple Play. These points swung matches to the point that if you had no ramps, say goodnight because you aren’t winning. The other thing is that they are very hard to adequately defend against.

  4. The other thing I have noticed is that defense is a vital part. Stopping opposing hangers puts you in good position to win a match. Two defensive robots and one scorer would not have won last year or the year before that, but this year defense is an integral part of each alliance.

16

concerning the end of each match, I would have to disagree. At my first regional (LA) lifting did become a match decider. There could be no blue ringers on the rack and 4 red on the rack, but blue still won with their 60pts.

However, in SD, I quickly realized that this lifting bonus had almost no effect on the game depending on the alliances. Before the pairings we lifted 330 in hopes of lifting every match during the elim rounds (like 1717) but it turns out our third alliance robot wasn’t even able to get on our wing despite our 1" ground clearance… haha. anyways, in the final round, we figured that because lifting for 60 pts would only tie us with 1717 and their lifters, we would have to outscore them on the rack

and we even took a strategy from 330, but if your team hasn’t figured that strategy out yet, then watch 330 at Atlanta :stuck_out_tongue: (haha i feel like i’m advertising for you guys)

17

Weeks 4 and 5 say the beginnings of what I think Championship will look like (at particular regionals). Teams have figured out how to beat ramps, and beat them consistently. Many winning alliances still have ramps as an options, but no longer rely on them (and/or only use them for 30 a match). Spoilers are becoming bigger and bigger (when rows get full, spoilers are worth much more than ringers). Autonomous is now important (1114; 3/4 Vegas SF alliances scored keepers often; keepers determined several matches in 111s march to the WMR finals; etc.), especially in close and/or defensive matches. The rack is beginning to fill up (watch Waterloo, Boston, Toronto, Vegas, and Palmetto for proof). The winning alliances can either grind it out defensively, or pour on the points, depending on how their opponents play. Spoilers scare people, a lot (the “skunkworks spoiler” might just be my new favorite strategy :wink: ). Refs are cracking down on ramps and defense. The hybrids are shining (254, 330, and 1114 each won 2 regionals). The multi-threat alliances have come out firing. Welcome to Rack N’ Roll, here’s where the real fun starts.

18

I can appreciate the whole 2^n scoring thing this year, it makes fast and efficient scoring extremely important, as well as effective defense to allow you to establish your rows.

I’m also happy with the rack and the movement required. This was the year for creative drive trains, as opposed to last year, where all you needed was a simple drivetrain with brute strength and a turret. Crab drive was a huge advantage for our team, along with other high scorers, such as Wildstang and Beatty. Not required, mind you, great scoring was achieved by other “conventional” drive robots, but it was definitely a great advantage for us, and many others, based on how many I saw this year.

However, the randomizing algorithm - There are a lot of strong teams out there with high numbers, and weak teams with low numbers. It’s unfair to judge a team based on their number. At least in previous years, when we had less than favorable alliances, we had nothing to blame but luck. There are a lot of other things I could say about the so-called “randomizing”, but they’d all be euphemisms for “utter crap”. So I’ll stop there.

Automode was also given too little value. So it’s a ringer you can’t spoil. There are plenty of others that you can that will do the job just as well. Plus, we have a rotating and translating light and rack, along with legs that swing wildly. Despite it’s rather minute value to the game, its difficulty made ringers scored in auto very satisfying.

The kit of parts also proved to be another design challenge. Nothing like having to deal with sub-standard parts and unneccesarily large/heavy components to stimulate the engineering mind.

I hope FIRST develops more games where more complicated drivetrains are advantageous, in more ways than just ground clearance. Wildstang’s 2004 robot comes to mind. I see them as being just as important as manipulators, if not more so.

All in all, a well-done game, except for the dodgy alliance algorithm.

19

The Autonomous ringer carried no bonus for a reason this year. Consider an alliance that can score 6 ringers on average. The Autonomous ringer doubles that score at the end of the round. You shouldn’t think of the original value but it’s value at the end.

We removed our camera as a quick fix to get to our weight. In retrospect, we should have kept it since we might have been scoring autonomous by our third match at GTR. The camera programming had been tested on our last year’s robot.

20

#1 Autonomous was not worth enough
#2 Ramps are worth too much, or ringers aren’t worth enough
#3 Defense rules the day if it is played

Even at Western Michigan, we saw that it is very easy for an “ok” robot to shut down an “excellent” scoring bot. This competition can very easily turn into a snooze fest while 3 ramp bots play defense on the other teams scorers, then ramp for the win.

Nationals will see some high scores, but it’s also going to see insane defense played by some of the top end bots there with good drivetrains. It’s not even necessary to push the other bot in the corner - just stay between them and the rack and 90% of the offensive bots will not be able to score.