Entertaining. The more things change the more they stay the same.
While putting a robot out for a match might be considered strategic, if they couldn't play the rest of the N-final, as EricH says, that doesn't do any good anyway. So terminal elimination wouldn't be desired. We don't think like that anyway and in fact I was having trouble getting the students to even touch another robot for much of the tournament. The fact that the driver began doing the bulldozer for the quarter-finals was miraculous. In fact he thought the 'incident' to be strategic and wondered why it was a foul.
Referring to rule 2.5.4: Backup Teams, in this years manual, you become the fourth member if you get knocked out. That is why I was perplexed that before we got our replacement wheel back on for the last match of our semi-final, that the official came and told us if we were not back on the field in time we would be 'disqualified', their words. I would have disagreed, but we got our replacement wheel back on with help from another team, so we never got to test this out.
If they are as quick to call tipping a 30 point foul, I am wondering if anyone has ever tried a 'play dead' strategy. Could a robot be built and programmed to tip itself, perhaps using a throttle burst, if a large enough jolt occurred. There would be some finesse involved to make this look real. It seems like if a game was close and they are so quick to call it, it might be a good 30 point play. I mean look how hard people worked to make a 30 point climber, the auto-tip seems a bit easier.
Especially if you also had an up-righting mechanism
