The observation is that if the Skyrise base is not screwed down flat, there will be an angle to the built Skyrise. In other words it will not be perpendicular to the field tiles. If the angle is bad enough, it will cause an autonomous routine to fail at some point. Even though the Skyrise base is within the 1 inch tolerance of field drawings, there is the possibility that the top of a 7 high Skyrise is well outside of this tolerance.
I believe that some method of checking the angle of the 7 high Skyrise could be used (it may well already be modus operandi, I don’t know) when competion fields are assembled, for example a spirit level or even better, a custom made square.
This would help to prevent the situation where one team could get an unfair advantage over another team simply because of a difference in the Skyrise base assembly.
We had this exact situation arise as we were setting up PA states with the wood floor needing to be protected. So cardboard boxes was the solution of choice.
The foam mats caused the skyrise to be wobbly so we ended up cutting the boxes so only the metal field wall set on the wood gym floor. Luckily we caught this at set up and not during match play. It would have messed up plenty of robots auton routines.
So I can see how this could be an issue. You want the field to be set up on a hard, level surface - especially for the skyrise base metal plates.
Maybe in next year’s manual there can be some guidelines and best practices for setting up your field. Putting foam tiles on carpeted surface can also have drive issues too.
Well, I have set up the field about 10 times in our Robotics room by myself, It is really obvious if the skyrise base is angled enough to affect autonomous. To be safe bring a hex key and screw them in a little more before your first match.
At any competition I was reffing I would NOT be happy with participants getting out tools and messing with the setup of competition fields.
From what we’ve experienced, it also seems like sometimes over-tightening of the screws on the Skyrise base can result in it not being level. The best thing to do when setting it up is first to make sure the tabs of the field tiles don’t get caught between the base and the plate, and then to tighten the screws in stages rather than tightening some of the screws before the others.
Depends how many Skyrise sections you are completing in auton. When you are completing 7 sections, it is much more of an issue than if you are completing say 3 or 4 sections.
