A full day of matches on a real field
On Saturday, October 10, System Overload Robotics hosted 10th Street Throwdown at 3100 E 10th Street in Oakland, the practice field of Highlander Robotics (8033). Eleven teams brought their REBUILT robots for a day of qualification matches, fuel everywhere, and practice for the drive teams ahead of fall competitions.
Scrimmages like this are where drive teams get reps, pit crews find what breaks, and new members see a match up close for the first time. We ran the whole event ourselves, from the schedule and refereeing to a field management system our team built for scoring the hubs.
The teams
Thank you to every team that made the trip.
- 114EaglestrikeLos Altos, CA
- 2035The Rockin' BotsCarmel, CA
- 3045Gear GremlinsSan Mateo, CA
- 4159CardinalBoticsSan Francisco, CA
- 4669Galileo RoboticsSan Francisco, CA
- 5026Iron PanthersBurlingame, CA
- 5940BREADRedwood City, CA
- 6059System Overload RoboticsLivermore, CA
- 7419TECH SupportDublin, CA
- 8033Highlander RoboticsPiedmont, CA
- 8793Pumpkin BotsHalf Moon Bay, CA
Qualification results
Each row is one match: red alliance on the left, blue on the right. Shaded bars scale with the score.
Photos
Select any photo to see it larger.
Photos by Henry Rosenberg and event volunteers.
How a REBUILT match is scored
Every fuel ball that lands in your alliance's hub while it's active is worth a point. The catch is that the hubs take turns: during the four teleop shifts, only one alliance can score at a time.
Fuel
| Ball in an active hub | 1 |
| Grace window after a hub turns off | 3 s |
Balls that go into a hub while it's off score nothing.
Tower climbs
| Auto, Level 1 | 15 |
| Endgame, Level 1 | 10 |
| Endgame, Level 2 | 20 |
| Endgame, Level 3 | 30 |
Fouls and ranking points
| Minor foul, to opponent | 5 |
| Major foul, to opponent | 15 |
| Win / tie | 3 / 1 RP |
| Energized: 100+ fuel | +1 RP |
| Supercharged: 360+ fuel | +1 RP |
| Traversal: 50+ tower points | +1 RP |
Watchtower FMS
The hubs on the 10th Street field don't count balls, and an offseason event can't borrow FIRST's field system. So our team built its own.
Watchtower is a field management system that runs on one laptop over the venue WiFi. Cameras watch each hub opening, and a YOLO object-detection model counts every ball that goes in. Watchtower checks each count against the match clock to decide whether that alliance's hub was active, then adds climbs and fouls to produce the score.
- Scorekeeper starts the matchWatchtower builds the timeline of auto, transition, shifts, and endgame from that click.
- Hub cameras count fuelEach detected ball is logged with which hub it entered and when.
- Refs log fouls from their phonesMinor and major buttons for each alliance, with the fouling team tagged.
- The emcee calls the hub lightsTheir phone shows who won auto and counts down to every hub change.
- Scorekeeper reviews and commitsCounts can be corrected before a score is final. Committed results, rankings, and alliances are sent to The Blue Alliance automatically.
Screenshots use demo data.
Free and open source. Watchtower is MIT-licensed so any team can run its own REBUILT scrimmage. It also works without cameras: the scorekeeper can type fuel counts for each period instead.
Thank you
To Highlander Robotics (8033) and Piedmont Makers for opening up the 10th Street field, to every volunteer who refereed, reset the field, inspected robots, and kept the pits safe, and to the ten teams who came to play. See you at the next one.