[DougHogg]

Originally posted by srjjs
I think a better parallel than the NASCAR racing can be found within the game itself.
A closer example would be in autonomous mode. If your robot reaches the top of the ramp and knocks down the wall before your opponent, should you cheer? That can certainly be interpreted as a failure of your opponent's robot, but that does not mean that it is any less a success of yours.

I agree that a NASCAR racing car flipping doesn't parallel someone flipping your robot. After all, we don't ride in our robots. I was just trying to illustrate with a very extreme case, that sometimes it isn't appropriate to cheer when something bad happens to your opponent, even if that event means that you are going to win.

Also you are right. We can all get too sensitive to things like people cheering when they beat us to the stack. That is meant to be part of the game.

My only point about flipping robots is that it is against the rules to flip a robot on purpose, so if we do flip someone, maybe we shouldn't cheer too loudly about it, since if it happens enough times, the referees may decide that we are doing it on purpose and disqualify us. Also hopefully teams aren't employing tactics that they know will flip other robots "accidentally on purpose".

Other than that, if it happens, it happens. It does add a certain amount of drama to the game when a robot goes over. Maybe in future years, we will all pay more attention to having self-righting robots--a cool ability I wish we had.

(Our robot is 5 feet high this year, but so far we haven't tipped. I hope it stays that way.)