What would be the legality of having 3d printed purple decorations on the robot, and spray painted purple polycarbonate? I guess it could go against D.
Decorations that visually mimic field elements, or could otherwise interfere with an opponent’s
Vision Sensor, are considered functional and are not permitted. This includes lights, such as the VEX
Flashlight. The Inspector and Head Referee will make the final decision on whether a given decoration or mechanism violates this rule.
What do you think? Should my team choose another color for this year? We already purchased the spray paint, so worst comes to worst we just buy another can.
There are arguments against making a judge work out whether your robot distracted another from its visualy targeted rings during auton. If you’re dead-set on purple, you could explore the colours a ring can seem in a wide range of lighting conditions and then explore your robot with a vision sensor using signatures trained on the rings, giving you notebook content and confidence. Or you could say “nah it’ll be fine, it’s never been a problem before” and hope that you’re not doing anything new that’s worth testing. We’re engineers. Do the thing.
Aye, if there’s something overtly asking for trouble then inspectors; if there’s something subtle the referees might have to catch it if it causes issues; and I guess a judge might only be appropriately impressed by care taken not to distract during interview?
That’s about right. Although each year brings new advancements in sensors, it’s a rare event that I’ve ever seen a team using vision at a local event, so its not likely a problem. If I were the inspector, and had a concern that a team has a purple-ringle-shaped-nonfunctional-decoration-that-looks-just-like-a-game-element, I would probably just note it, and alert the head referee, since the ramifications would not actually be known until a match has been played. Then the head referee could make the appropriate call about the nonfunctional decoration.
in my brief experience with vision sensors, they’re simply not very good at telling a specific color apart from other colors.
Which means any color remotely close to purple (blue, or possibly even red) could be picked up by a vision sensor looking for purple. Most likely robots with vision sensors would want to be looking down in front of them for rings, not across the field at other robots, but I suppose it’s remotely possible you could pass in front of them during auton, and a purple thing on your robot could be picked up by the sensor.
But at the same time, almost nobody actually uses the vision sensor, and the people that do pretty much exclusively use it during auton, where you aren’t likely to be right in front of them where they’d be looking. So I think you’d be relatively safe, but just be prepared to take off the decorations if a referee asks you to.
It is not that they are useless, but they just not good enough to justify the price vex sells them for.
You can, maybe sell them to engineering class that will be happy if it works once after you adjust lighting many times, but for competitions they are just too unreliable at the moment to bet your programming skills run on, at the worlds qualifying event.
It’s a shame that vex spent so much money developing vision sensor software and there is so little usage. Maybe if they opened it up for users to code its internal algorithms there will be more people willing to give it a try.
As a closed system, they are not very usable. We got one for many teams, tried it, got disappointed, and now it collects dust and we have no plans to get more.