Quote:
Originally Posted by dodar
Wrong. If an opponents ball lands in your robot and you stop moving and you were not purposefully catching the ball, then you are not shielding the ball purposefully from the other alliance.
If the other alliance's ball happens to land inside your robot and it was inadvertent, if you stop moving immediately then it would seem that you would not be penalized.
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As the rules are written, I believe you're right.
That being said, I highly doubt the call will be this cut and dry. If you catch a ball, put your hands up in the air, and make it clear to the refs that you did not intend to do it, and you don't want to actively release it, then what happens? Do you sit there for the rest of the match as a black hole? Does the Head Ref make the call to put another ball into play as if your robot died with a ball in it? It's an interesting (and annoying) situation to think about for sure.
If anything, there needs to be some sort of grace period for an unintentional catch, where a machine is given some reasonable amount of time (say 5-10 seconds) to get the ball out of their robot without being penalized - although even that isn't that simple. On paper, there are certain situations where it may make sense for a team to build a human load only machine, where the only method of releasing the ball they have is a truss or goal shot - at that point, does them shooting the ball (where ever) turn an accident into a strategic advantage? Teams with intakes or other methods of doing a 'slow' and or 'controlled' ball release wouldn't really be an issue here, since they could essentially drop the ball where it was caught and carry on with the match.