I don’t see anything about retroreflective tape in the documentation I’ve found. In this thread folks are saying they heard that retroreflective tape is discontinued as of this year, but it would be nice to see some official communication about the tape, if any exists. In past years do they usually document where the tape is located on the field? I’m wondering if lack of documentation indicates it won’t be there (or perhaps that one can’t rely on it to be there).
There are no retro reflective vision targets this year, just Apriltags
Thanks for the quick reply @Emerson1706 . Do you have a source for that?
If you check the manual in 2023 and 2024 you will notice that 2024 is missing all retro reflective tape markers. Meaning there are no rr tape markers on the field
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First also made an announcement last season saying that retro reflective tape will be phased out in exchange for the apriltags, and that last season was the last with retro reflective tape.
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https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/blog/2022-control-system-reporting-2023-updates-and-beta-testing is relevant. There may be a more recent follow-up.
I think their omission from the game manual and CAD files is evidence enough, given that it was meticulously present in past seasons. I’m not personally aware of it, but I imagine that there’s an FRC blog post outlining the switch.
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To save searching through the linked blog post, the relevant sentence is:
“The 2023 field will contain AprilTag targets in addition to retroreflective targets (more on those below) with the goal of moving away from retroreflective targets in 2024, pending a smooth implementation this season.”
They accomplished their goal. There are zero references to tape targets in any game documentation for 2024.
And the GDC saw all that they had changed, and behold, it was very good.
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Time to disable the LL blinding green light for a while.
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