Hey all, congratulations to all teams who have competed this season and congratulations to the teams who have qualified for the Championship event on December 3rd! It has been quite the interesting season, to say the least, and it was truly inspiring experience for all of us to witness the professionalism, passion, and grace with which Bell AVR teams navigated and overcame the unexpected challenges faced in the past few weeks.
As most of you know by now, this year’s game has played out a bit differently than was originally intended! Going into the championship event, we believe we have landed on a much more stable field configuration, a much simpler game, and more straightforward scoring, while retaining as many of the originally intended gameplay elements as possible. For Championship, we will be making as few “on-the-fly” modifications as possible, and have comprehensively documented the current state of the game in (what is hopefully) the final Game Manual Update of the season.
The latest update can be found here: https://www.roboticseducation.org/documents/2022/08/emergency-firefighting-challenge-bell-avr-competition-game-manual.pdf/
Changes in this update are highlighted in yellow throughout the Game Manual. They are too numerous to list individually, but here are some of the key items to watch for:
Key Game Manual Changes
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5.1.4 and 5.5.2 - Clarification on Tello Recon Path Autonomy requirements, and associated revised point values
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5.1.4.a - “Empty Water Tower” means “12 hits to the Water Tower by the RVR”
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5.1.5 and 5.1.6 - Revised Autonomous methodologies for scoring RVR and Tello actions. It’s more words… but it’s simpler, I promise! No more trying to keep track of Autonomous Checkpoint Line crosses.
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5.2, 5.3, 5.4 - New images and descriptions throughout to capture the new behaviors of the FMS and Fire Score tracking. For those who competed in Weeks 2 or 3, some of this should look familiar from the Drivers’ Meetings. We will also demonstrate it fieldside during the Drivers’ Meeting at Championship.
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5.6.7 - A new rule that requires LWC shots to be taken while the AVR Drone is in flight, i.e. not parked on top of the Fire Station.
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6.3.4 and Appendix B - New point values / weights for the Presentation scoring rubric.