I’m an EP and am always looking for ways to improve the events I’m involved with. This year with the addition of the autonomous skills score being a part of the Excellence criteria, coupled with the fact that Worlds double qualifications are given based on the regional event’s skills rankings, skills is more important than ever. It is also one of the hardest parts of an event to organize. I would love to find out what worked (and didn’t work) in other regions. If you attended a regional event, please answer the following questions.
How many teams were at your event?
Did most teams at your event run skills?
How many skills fields were there?
How long was skills open?
How was the line handled (one team member only? Robot required for line? any others?)
How many skills runs did you get to do?
Was there ample opportunity for your team to get 3 driver and 3 autonomous skills runs?
Do you have any suggestions for how the whole skills process could be improved? If so, please share
Speaking for Alabama events, there were usually 20-35 teams at my tournaments. Usually there was only 1 skills field, but sometimes there was 2. Due to the limited skills fields, most teams didn’t complete all skills runs, but most did at least 1. Skills is usually open from after inspection to the start of finals matches, and a break for the drive team meeting.
The rule we had to follow was that you could wait in line for skills without a robot, but if you got to the front and had no robot, teams could pass you. Probably more skills fields for skills would be beneficial, and also having more exsperienced people at skills. Most tournaments had volunteers working, and I watched so many teams break rules and the volunteer had no idea. I would say for skills and non skills, hire people who truly know what they are doing so that it is faster and accurate.
I love that you are looking for open feedback about tournaments as an ep!
How many teams were at your event?
70 for MS (Sunday), 47 for Elem (Saturday).
Did most teams at your event run skills?
yes
How many skills fields were there?
9 in the morning. Two 3 field field sets and 3 dedicated skills fields
How long was skills open?
All 9 fields open for skills in the morning. After lunch, the three remained.
How was the line handled (one team member only? Robot required for line? any others?)
Line never really got that long, so no real rules. If I came by the line I would say “No bot no spot.”
How many skills runs did you get to do?
There were a number of times in the morning and afternoon where there was no line at all. So I think the teams got to do the runs they wanted to do.
Was there ample opportunity for your team to get 3 driver and 3 autonomous skills runs?
Yesssss
Do you have any suggestions for how the whole skills process could be improved? If so, please share
For IQ it’s a LOT easier than VRC. But skills are really important, especially at regionals. You can find ways to use the skills fields you have more efficiently, but at the end of the day, you can only squeeze so much out of them. For a regional event, you might need a bigger venue that can accommodate more fields. And then more fields. Work it into your budget now so you can give them the best opportunity you can next year.
(We also did a 16-team MS VRC regional event. Two fields. Run skills in the morning until they were done with skills and then quals after. Ran a little longer than we liked but still not there too late.)
I’m from Washington, and we just had our states this past weekend. I’d say skills worked out decently well for all of the teams here, so I’ll share some logistics.
our experience
50 teams
around 40 completed at least some runs for both driver and autonomous
3 for the entire day, but competition fields were used for skills before quals started
as stated previously, the entire day
it was a little chaotic, but generally it was one team member, if their robot wasn’t there, instead of calling over their team they just skipped down the line and pulled the first person with a robot ready
personally, my team did 5, but we felt it would’ve been very difficult to improve with our 6th so we decided to tune autos on the practice field instead of doing our 6th (we had time for it though) - most teams did 5/6
for sure
very clearly demarcating where people can stand in the skills line, and perhaps using something similar to stanchions to keep the line organized can prevent cutting and keep the line moving
In general, one thing I’ve found very helpful is opening skills the night before, though of course, that’s not always possible. Good luck with running your events!
One other thing to consider would be running a Skills-Only event. My club held one on Sunday and I’m pretty sure we got over 330 runs done by about 70 teams, running from about 9.30 to about 5pm. We’d run a tournament the day before and were able to get 2 uses out of 1 setup and tear-down.
The EP broke the day up into 3 2-hour windows with about 24 slots for teams to sign up for each window. We had 5 skills fields and 1 practice field.
Running it on the last day for global skills to finalize helped draw in some teams traveling (our ERC has a waiver to be run after the ERC deadline). I’m sure running it the last day for a region’s scores to pull to their ERC would draw a lot of teams as well.
Hi I attended the California Region 4 San Diego States:
How many teams were at your event?
42
Did most teams at your event run skills?
From what I could tell yes.
How many skills fields were there?
2
How long was skills open?
From the start of qual matches until the end of it, excluding lunch.
How was the line handled (one team member only? Robot required for line? any others?)
One member was given a “coin” that would signify that they were in line.
How many skills runs did you get to do?
We chose to only do one but we could have done a 2nd if we wanted to.
Was there ample opportunity for your team to get 3 driver and 3 autonomous skills runs?
Not really, the one member in line rule wasn’t really enforced so it got crowded and slowed the process down
Do you have any suggestions for how the whole skills process could be improved?
More fields? I feel the event staff did a good job running it though if the 1 member rule was enforced it certainly would have helped.
Hi, Ref from the Wisconsin regionals here. I wasn’t running the skills fields so my information may be slightly off, but from what I saw:
We had 48 HS teams and 16 MS teams, most if not all attempted skills. We had 2 skills fields, depending on time & demand the fields were either split 1 for HS and 1 for MS or both open to both. Skills was open the first night and most of the second day, and if teams volunteered to help set up the event they had more time to run skills as they were already through inspection and checked in as soon as skills opened. Lines were 1 team member + bot if available, some teams would send a team member to wait in line while they were in a match and then give them the bot after the match to get through the line quicker. Most of the higher level teams ran 4-6 of their skills runs, they had a lot of small tricks like mentioned above to get through the line quickly. As for improvements, if you have the volunteers and supplies to run them more fields will always help people get through quicker.
I liked the way we ran skills at the Northeast Wisconsin Signature event, it takes a lot more volunteers but it got people through quick. Instead of having designated skills fields, they ran skills on the competition fields in the morning before competition started, and during the first night, lunch breaks, and after qualification was over they shut down the practice fields in each pit and allowed teams to run skills at the practice field in their pit zone.
Skills fields were open during the qualification matches and during the lunch break. Skills ended with the final qualification match. ( We had a few tech glitches that slowed us down at the beginning an kept us from opening the fields before qualifications.
We let a team member hold a place in line without the robot. Next available robot got the open field. (Mainly due to the small downtime between matches)
We ran 168 total skills matches in about 6 hours
Teams that prioritized sills were able to get their attempts. Here is a breakdown. (note: even though this was states, there were quite a few teams with limited/no autonomous routines.)
Driver Attempts
#
Auton Attempts
#
3
13
3
11
2
21
2
9
1
14
1
22
total
48
total
42
Suggestions: I’d look at the similar thread that @RoboticsEli mentioned
Other Notes:
Our area is recently expanding and this was the biggest event / skills demand that we’ve had. We knew there would be increased demand for skills but it was greater than we expected. (The week before at our final tournament of 35 teams, only 11 teams attempted auton skills - no excellence award was given.)
In previous years, the event only used 1 skills field.
We talked about running skills on all fields in the morning or over lunch, but it was last minute and we were not prepared to do it from a technical/logistics standpoint.
When we host our local event next year, I’m pretty sure we will test running skills on all fields for an hour or so and possibly 2 fields after that.
From 8:45–2:30 (from driver meeting to around 3/4 of the way through matches). They closed skills at 2:30 but if you still had someone in line you could go.
As long as you had a person there, it was okay. Even had members from our sister team hold occasionally when we had matches.
Only 2, but we had some issues with our code and such…our brain started smoking the night before
Reasonable opportunity, better than most other comps i was at ths season but still not perfect
One thing at a previous comp I liked was giving each team two fast passes, one for driver and one for prog skills. Helped a lot by guaranteeing every team two runs (if they so chose).
We can advocate for Mr. Sankey. His regionals events were run very well. We easily had time to complete all of our skills runs while having a lot of time for qualifications. Very happy with how the events turned out. : D
I went to the TIS Robotics Challenge in Tianjin (counts as a regional event I’d imagine, an RSM described it as a national-level tournament)
30 teams
Only 7 or so teams managed to have more than 4 skills attempts, but most were able to complete at least one skills run.
1 skills field
All of qualifying (1.5 days)
During the first day it was first come first serve because there was no queue, but starting the 2nd day the one-team member system was implemented informally with a line made last minute. After skills closed the EP collected the team numbers of some teams and allowed some teams to complete a skills run after closing time.
We managed to get 5 skills runs, with most of them on the first day.
As long as teams utilized time during the first day of competition to complete skills, yes.
Adding a skills field on the 2nd day would help a lot. The EP for this event really emphasized that teams needed to be responsible with their own time and that there would be a lot of teams trying to complete skills runs right before the field closes, so teams at this tournament understood this expectation but still ran out of time for skills.