What the judges said was the following:
After looking at all the extender mechanisms that were used in robots at the Langley regional, they decided that none of the mechanisms was designed to maliciously entangle another robot. After coordinating with the FL competition and FIRST HQ, they decided that the rules are changed as follows:
- If the extender entangles another robot, the alliance with the extender will be DQed.
- If the extender entangles a goal, the alliance with the extender will be DQed.
-> EXCEPTION: If the other alliance pushes the goal over the extender, the pushing alliance will be DQed.
It seemed to me that the judges would check all the robots with extenders prior to their use to ensure that the extender is not intended to maliciously entangle another robot (or any other purpose than active scoring, but that is just an interpretation).

Jan Olligs

P.S.: Several teams used extenders and it was a lot of fun to watch - they are really different...

Although a little biast, ours was **REALLY** cool. It floped on the ground, then another piece can off, and then so on. It all folded up into one convinent package. One used a pole that went up then when it became top heavy, went down, and then extended more. MOE used my idea and used a sicizor system on one wheel. It failed once or twice. Ours fail once. One even used a thin paper towl like thing that came out of thier robot.

In the rule book it says that " A robot may not intentionally DEPLOY anything under the goal" If a goal is pushed over part of your robot, how can you be DQ'ed?

Wayne Doenges

See you all in Cleveland!!!

This entire discussion has gotten way out of hand. When FIRST decided to give points for being in the homezone, I doubt that having 8 different arms, extensions, and the like shoot out from each robot is what they had in mind. All of these little 'mouse bots' are really bending the rules, especially when it comes to entanglement. I am annoyed that FIRST hasn't been as strict on the entanglement rules as they said they would be. Any team with one of these go home devices should feel lucky that so far they have been allowed at regionals. I hope that more DQ's will be given out by the refs to curb the overuse of the minibots. The tethered bots really undermine the play of the game and are a lazy way out of strategizing. Lastly, why should a team which places a goal on a tether be DQ'd? I see it as a way of blocking the opponent, which is explicity legal. A tethered device, like the ones seen at the first regionals, shouldn't be out on the field anyway. Teams with the go home robots need to stop whining about being mauled by the other robots. If they want to push the envelope with the tethered robots, they should expect others to fight back in a similar fashion. I just dont want to see the finals become an all out tether war, as that would dull the game tremendously.

I think that FIRST just has not been very clear on the entanglement rule. If I remember correctly, it states somewhere on the message board what kinds of mechanisms can not be used for extenders (e.g. tape measurer, our first idea for an extender). This post implied that extenders themselves were allowed and expected, even if under restrictions due to the risk of entanglement.
In any way, teams using extenders are risking DQs, which are completely up to the referees. Because you can not complain about any decisions of the referees, they can actually decide however they want.
I think, extenders are a way to make the game more interesting and intelligent and a solution to take advantage of the other team's score, if you score for them from another zone.
Just my opinion, though.

Has FIRST given any claification to the entanglement rule since the regionals ended?

As far as I know, no. I have checked the FIRST websiteevery day so far and there is no team update. Furthermore, the Yahoo forum is dead according to FIRST. Probably they are going to decide everything on a case-by-case basis.

At the Buckeye Regional there were no DQ's for entanglement, even though I saw many times where the device got entangled in the robot. Some got broken off.
I saw arrow shaft extenders, HPDE extenders and even a TAPE MEASURE. All were legal.
Our extenders were pieces of 7" wide Lexan. One was 22' long and the other was 12' long. A couple of times our extenders got flipped up but we were never DQ'ed. BTW we can extend into both zones which we did a couple of times.

Wayne Doenges