Re: IRI Finals Question
 

In the regular season, it depended on which week, and where, and how far.

However, for IRI, the basic foul part of that was removed, leaving continuous/repeated violations as a technical foul, along with contact outside the safety zone as a major foul. IF a team was repeatedly reaching outside safety zone, then a tech foul should have been called--but, speaking as a ref, the safety zone was the absolute hardest thing to enforce, particularly for minor violations.


@websass: It's entirely possible that they weren't trying to prevent a shot, but to throw off the aim. One of the best ways to throw off aim is to hit the corner of a robot, repeatedly if they return to their start position. Thus, it's entirely possible that it was accidental that they ended up on top of another robot. But, even an accidental maneuver that ends that way is probably going to net a technical foul at least--and the refs will probably have their choice of fouls to call (pinning, damaging contact inside frame perimeter, and inhibition are all technical fouls).

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

330s bot was slighty tippy, and quick changes of direction caused it to rock. I don't believe it was intentional. However, they did damage 469, and the tech was certainly deserved.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

I was thinking the same thing about possession. Upon further investigation I found out that unless there was a rule change I did not know about, it should not have counted for possession. Here is the FIRST definition of possession in the rule book:

“carrying” (moving while supporting BALLS in or on the ROBOT or holding the BALL in or on the ROBOT),
“herding” (repeated pushing or bumping),
“launching” (impelling BALLS to a desired location or direction via a MECHANISM in motion relative to the ROBOT), or
“trapping” (overt isolation or holding one or more BALLS against a FIELD element or ROBOT in an attempt to shield them).

All of these definitions require that the robot actually moves either a manipulator or the whole robot in order to direct the ball. By definition, the hard bounce is NOT possession. No idea why they counted it. However, there was a rule change for IRI saying that zones don't matter for assists, not sure if that affected anything judgment-wise.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

Their hard bounce for the definition of launching. The ball went where they wanted it to and their catapult arm moved relative to their robot

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

In the case of 2056 at IRI there was not a hard bounce. It looked like their shooter had a bit of a spring to it, so the ball went in, bent the shooter back, and then the shooter would spring forward. This would count as "launching," because there was a mechanism in motion relative to the robot. 4334 had a similar strategy at Champs.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

As I previously explained earlier in the thread, 2056's catapult deflected when the ball hit it. They didn't just bounce the ball off a rigid part of the robot - they bounced the ball of their catapult while it was in the "just fired" position. As the catapult went in and back out, the robot was LAUNCHING the ball and it counts as an assist.

In general, rather than assuming a world class FRC team and the reffing crew at the most prestigious off season in the country were all unaware of the rules, I would consider that maybe there's something you're missing or isn't obvious from a web cast.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

2056s catapult is on a winch with an encoder so they have it half cocked giving it the ability to move back and launch the ball to the human player and since it was their catapult it counts as launching.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

takes a clever team to make a lie of "never go off half-cocked" :)

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

Realistically, no part of the robot is perfectly rigid. Throwing a ball at a goalie pole, or side shield, or any other number of non-spring loaded mechanisms would also deflect and bounce the ball back to a desired location (if done properly).

IMO, it was a slippery slope to allow those short bounce-off type possessions because from the get go because you can get so deep into the 'technically its deflecting' part of the rule description.

That being said, it was a tough nuance of the game that was difficult to parse out, and it seemed those type of possessions were being called consistently. Thats all you can really ask for in weird situations.

-Brando

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

Technically speaking, every material you chuck the ball at will deform and push the ball back, so I agree, every time I hit a ball with my robot, I'm impelling it with motion relative to the robot.

But remember, this is FIRST, where rules aren't interpreted the way they're written, but are interpreted according to how people are feeling on a particular day (see extending outside field fouls), and according to FIRSTers, should be "interpreted by Grandmothers", who are the most qualified people in the world to make decisions in an engineering project. :rolleyes:

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

1) Clean match during auto, though 1114's goalie auto was racking up techs during qualifications. It looked like they changed it a bit going into elims.
2) 1114's claw got caught in 2056's strings. If you watch the match video, the entanglement did not start as bad as it ended. Originally, the string was stretched outside of 2056's frame perimeter and caught on the bottom half of 1114's claw. As the two of them moved around, the tangle got worse and worse until both robots were disabled.
3) As said by other users, the penalty was actually against 330. I believe the lack of a call was good, as the entanglement really was neither team's fault. It's not like 2056 has any control of where the strings flop around, and they really don't flop that far outside the perimeter anyway.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

At Mt. Olive district, three robots got entangled during an elims match (semi?), and were disabled 'due to safety hazard'. Basically, prevent the teams from doing more damage to either robot, volunteers around the field, or field elements by continuing to flop around while entangled. As a note, that match was also replayed since it was paused-and-restarted during the entanglement issue.

Best guess is that's also why it happened at IRI. However, it happened insanely late in the match after the entanglement started, and the teams were allowed to move around and try to get un-stuck for at least 15 seconds.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

This bothered me a bit, actually. 1114 had what appeared to be a neat, rainbow colored 20" stick that would swing out from under their robot to maintain contact with the goalie zone while blocking the low goal. Despite this appendage being really visible, at least once I saw 1114 get a technical foul for leaving the goalie zone when this appendage was indeed maintaining contact. I'm guessing this was cleared up for elims as 1114 didn't get any technical in auto during elims that I remember.

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

What happened happened, and the past is in the past.

However, for the sake of discussion, I'm interested in the reverse of the other side of the coin. The rules this year are defined such that the definition of possession is the same for both alliances with both balls, irrespective of who 'owns' the ball.

If 2056 had been executing the same maneuver with the other alliance's ball somehow (perhaps the other alliance's HP messed up their inbound or whatever), I definitely think it would have fallen under the modified G21 (if it was in fact considered a possession) or not been considered a possession (instead considered deflection). However, which side of the fence does it fall on here?

Re: IRI Finals Question
 

What the manual says about possession is not how referees call possession. The manual is not the source of referee judgement. This was admitted by a member of the GDC at the CMP driver's meeting.

Regardless of what the rules say, offensive possession is totally different from defensive possession. These kinds of contradictions really bug me.

1114's coach asked if offensive possession was judged differently from defensive possession. The response was yes, it is judged differently. At this point, a few other people asked where this was written, and the answer was "it's not written, it's up to the individual referees, but don't worry we've gone over it with them, and it'll be consistent", but they didn't spell out what was considered offensive or defensive possession because they didn't want to give people something to argue about with refs.