The best part of competition robotics is competing! We’ve had a tough time with this, our last few events from last season got canceled, and early events for this season didn’t happen. Lots of teams have been shut down for long periods of time, or just working at home with a friend. So it’s taken a long time to get robots that work. In the last few weeks robots have started to move and score, so we are ready to have events.
Events have now broken down into a few different types
1) Local Skills only — show up, get access to a field for 30 mins and do your 6 skill runs
2) Remote Skills only — meet in a virtual meeting space (Zoom, teams, etc.) the Referee runs the match (3-2-1 go) and the remote team does their run. Scores are calculated and tallied. The advent of phones with decent cameras makes this easier, one can follow the robot, one can give a wide view of the field. Then the camera can go from tower to tower to verify the placement.
3) Remote Head to Head — Teams play on their local field but are in the same meeting as another team to work together.
We are going to try to do some Skills events first (Remote skills on January 30,2021) to see how thing will work out. With a little luck we’ll get three of them in (January, February, March) for this season.