Wait, what?
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Originally Posted by Hoover
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. ... In fact he thought the 'incident' to be strategic and wondered why it was a foul.
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Trying to "put out a robot" for any length is NOT ok and should be penalized. Actually, the fact that your driver thought that tipping was strategic is a direct violation of [G28], which directly calls out "strategies aimed at .. tipping."
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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.
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You called a time-out, I assume. The rules say that you have to be ON the field by the time the time-out ends. The refs do enforce this: in 2009 it cost 188-610-1305 the Greater Toronto Regional. Besides, even if you DO disagree with the ref, the Head Ref's word is final.
This ruling might have changed though: in Montreal, there was a team in the finals that was off the field after their time-out ended. They were allowed on the field, but had to be disabled due to [G07]. So, even if you HAD been let on the field, you probably wouldn't have been able to move your robot anyways.
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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
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Again, the manual kind of ruins this idea. [G26] says "ROBOTS may not intentionally fall down or tip over to block the FIELD." So that's one big minus against you. Then you've got the whole [G18-1] thing, which is all about not drawing penalties (like you would be if you made it look like people were tipping you). So, no, nobody has ever thought of building a flipping robot, because to do so would almost certainly mean
losing every single match you ever play.
So yeah, literally EVERYTHING that you suggested in this post is against at least one rule in the FRC-Manual. I'd suggest giving it another read or two.