You start off in the scoring zone (Zone 1 or Zone 5), so if your ally is disabled, you've got an automatic 10 points (assuming no one drags it out, etc.).

BUILD ROBUSTLY
 

Seeing that FIRST has already given advice about making "robust" robots and said that this is a "full contact" sport, it would be wise to build accordingly. I don't anticipate much malice in these contests-remeber the "gracious professionalism" talk and the talk that we should have fun, not go nuts?

That said, I'd like not to see the regionals turn into knock-down, drag-out fights. Full-contact and strategic elements are there to make the game interesting and challenging, but a team should not be able to win by disabling everybody else's robots. Furthermore, I don't like the amount if leeway given to the referees on calling the shots. The rules should tend more towards being made and examined before the contests rather than being made as the contests go along at the regionals.

But I don't expect to see much unnecessary roughness anyway.

Re: BUILD ROBUSTLY
 

Don't worry about the leeway given. You can't control that. Do what you can to control what you can. Just don't try to argue a ruling with a ref.

The leeway lets the refs have the initiative, so they don't have to wait until conditions are filled.

The rules are made and examined before the competition, but the referees have the FINAL ruling, PERIOD. The rules are left to interpretation so that people won't try to get the edge by bending the rules. This way, if a ref sees them trying to bend the rules, they still get penalized.

During our mock competition with 4 other local teams, our robot became entanged with another. We were locked into the opponents home zone and kept crying out, "they're pinning us!" hoping they'd back away for sec so we could move out.

It ends up that we had hooked a frame rail of theirs with our goal grabber. (Our goal grabber is a 1/2" dia steel hook, simple but effective.) We hooked them in such a manner that a co-ordinated movement by both of us would be required for separation. I don't think entanglement applies here, but it might . . .

Anyhow, the last 20-30 seconds of the match were spent with this opponnent in a stalemate. Afterwards they said, "we were tryng to get away but we couldn't." We believed them and figured that we'd have to be careful of that happening again during competition.

Here's the interesting part. They had high traction, low speed treads and we had 8 (4 pairs) of "custom treaded" wheelchair wheels. They were trying to go one way, we were trying to go the other. The resultant force took about half the bend out of our hook!:eek:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pi...rrow=4&trows=3

If you look at this claw. we use this type of claw in 1999 and we used it to pull robots off the puck. it worked great when we grap something hard on the other robot but what happen would be we ended up grabbing wires that were hanging around.

we never got DQ.

We will only use this if we need to move a robot who is in our way

we could get ten points for them but that is not our main plan.

this arm goes out 3 feet and can take a great impact.

if a robot ball handler is build weak this claw could crush them in.

this would not be our fault but the fault of the weak robot. we would be just trying to grab them.