Quote:
Originally Posted by EricH
Just so everyone's on the same page:
(The damage rule is also found in [G26], strategies aimed at damage.)
I read that as, if it's a high hit, no penalty unless it's either deliberate or damaging, and it makes it to or into the Frame Perimeter. You hit the bumpers at all, especially on the outside, all bets are off as to whether deliberate can be called; it's very possible to make the case that you didn't intend to, especially with the wide bumper zone this year and the potential ramifications of hitting a high bumper with a low bumper or vice versa. That just leaves damaging--and I hope that people actually build their robots to take a hit these days (back in my day... well, let's just say that bumpers were optional or non-existent until after I graduated high school, and leave it at that). That's the ref's nightmare right there--you have to be reasonably certain that it's deliberate contact to or inside the frame perimeter before you call that foul.
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A potential issue is that since their bumpers are so high in this configuration it'd be way to easy for them to go over the top of the other robot's bumpers, even if there's a bit of contact between the bumpers. So I don't think "...hit at all...." necessarily would prevent a penalty. And since it's deliberate OR damaging, deliberate isn't necessary. How much breakage is necessary to get to "damage" isn't something I know anything about; no zebra training for me.
Hopefully there won't be any issues; they won't run into someone with raised bumpers and the whole discussion will be moot. The inspectors were concerned that we didn't let them go through without full knowledge of what could happen, so if they choose to make some change to help mitigate the situation they can. We did that; I hope everyone concerned thinks we did it right. We certainly tried; we had a bunch of discussion before we ever talked to the refs. This wasn't something that we just kind of breezed into.
But again, the bottom line -- you guys should probably go stand in the question box & get a clear understanding, from the head ref, of the refs' position on this. They're the ones who's position matters at this point.