Quote:
Originally Posted by Madison
For what it is worth, 2952 was not touching us at all.
I was there.  |
I defer to your physical presence...I had only the photo and webcast to go off off. So, in that case, 1 CP (two fully-supported robots on an unbalanced bridge) is the right call—and the discussion Eric and I were having is not material to the outcome of the situation.
As for Eric's point, I think it's fundamentally a matter of interpreting the rules in a way that lends itself to consistency, rather than one that feels familiar. The rules and the Q&As propose no threshold for recognizing the support of a robot's weight, and I don't believe it is a good idea to pick an arbitrary threshold that doesn't at least have some physical or practical significance.
In terms of physical significance, I feel that contact implies at least an infinitesimal degree of support, in essentially all conceivable situations. (That's the idea that at a microscopic level, there's adhesion, irregularity and deformation—some of which is bound to be slightly weight-bearing.) So that's one standard we could use—and it's very easy.
Another option is for the referee to observe the conditions that could lead to weight being transferred (any member is deforming under contact and its own weight; any tilted member in contact implies there is a weight component in the normal force), even if the referee can't estimate the amount of weight involved or even if the amount of weight is minuscule. Static indeterminacy makes this somewhat more complicated, but you can still conceive of a probability distribution that implies that in all but the edge cases, there is at least a modicum of weight transfer through all members. This is a valid standard as well, because it's reasonably easy to enforce with minimal scrutiny, and has both practical and physical significance.
I think this rule is enforceable in a systematic way—indeed, the real problem with the rule is not in its construction, but in its interpretation.