Ramp Affecting Robot Movement
 

After watching the UTC Scrimmage, I noticed that many robots, when unsuccessful at getting on top of the HDPE, would slide down the steel mesh after power was shut off due to a lack of idle torque in their drive train. Well, if bins were on the steel mesh (not in scoring zone), would they be counted towards a team's match points if they were pushed into a scoring zone by a robot sliding down the ramp? If not, how will the judges differentiate the bins if a wide king of the hill robot happens to plow a field of bins down?

Refs will wait approximately 15 seconds, or until everything on the field has come to rest before they begin calculating scoring.

So are you saying that bins pushed into scoring zones by sliding robots past the time limit will count? That seems a bit unfair.

yep. yep.

I don't think it's unfair at all, really. It's true of all other scoring as well. Until the field and its components and robots have come to rest, it's unfair to calculate the score, I'd say.

If a stack falls over after the time is up, I'd rather not see arguments erupting over whether the refs were fast enough to score it, or whether they favored a certain alliance by scoring them first. This makes everything easier for all of us.

It's not unfair, it's an element of strategy.

That raises an interested point, that robots can and will slide into scoring zones, potentially raising or lowering their score...

...or, their opponent's score....

But if it slides into its own zone then every bin the robot is touching will not count, so a team when sliding down could loose all of its points.