Arms outside of the 72 Inch Window

[SgtMillhouse648]

Okay,
Yesterday while i was watching the Webcasts of VCU and New Jersey, I saw a number of teams who's arms on their robots appeared to extend beyond the 72x72 inch window. The refs called penalties for ramps being deployed beyond the window if they were outside the home zone, but I didn't see any teams getting penalized for "over-extending" arms. I know our arm can be extended beyond the 72 inch mark, but through programming it will never extend beyond the window. Is there something in the rulebook I didn't catch excluding arms?
Malhon Godwin

[Chris Marra]

During the practice matches at Jersey we were specifically called on this rule, and extended about 6 inches out of the box when placed horizontally, but were within it diagonally. A call was made to Aiden, the head ref for FIRST, who confirmed that they should abide by any configuration within the 72" box, and after that they had a box set up on the floor next to the field to test teams' arms for the rule.

[SgtMillhouse648]

Thanks for the clarification. The "auto retracting" boom took quite a while to figure out. Just wanted to make sure we didn't do it for nothing.
Thanks
Malhon Godwin

[Dan Richardson]

Thanks for the clarification. The "auto retracting" boom took quite a while to figure out. Just wanted to make sure we didn't do it for nothing.
Thanks
Malhon Godwin

Keep in mind that you are allowed to be within that box in ANY configuration. This Means that your arm could technically extand longer than 72" but at the hypotenus of that box your arm still fits.

Within this configuration if your bot was an infinitely thin line the robot could be just short of 102"

With a 28" wide robot and a roughly 6" wide gripper or arm, the robot could have an end to end length of some where in the ~84" range.