[tkwetzel]

An idea for goals:
Have goals like the mobile goals this year, but with a tod on them. Have a whole in the top just big enough for the balls. Just under the hole, have something that will hold onto a ball, but loosely enough that a robot could easily push it through. Sort of like a sock...cut open the closed end...you can put a tennis ball in it and it stays in the same position in the sock, but you can push the tennis ball and it will move through the sock. Have something like that that would hold a single ball very loosely (just tight enough to hold the ball). Any balls pushed in the goal belong to the other team, unless you have a ball in the capture device, then you get the points. So you would want to get as many balls in the goal as possible, but if you couldn't get a ball in the sock-like thing at the end of the match, the points would go to the opposite team. And you would have to be able to push the balls gently, otherwise they would just fall through. Teams would also want to protect the top ball near the end of the match, but there should be something like the bar this year that attracts the robots to do something at the end of a match. You would also have to make sure that the goals mentioned above could not be completely stuffed quickly and easily so as the top ball will remain there without a chance of falling. I'm not saying that you can't have enough balls to fill the goal...it just has to be difficult, so good teams could fill teh goal and not have to worry about defending their "top ball". For a multiplier, you could require the goal to be lifted onto a 2' high platform or something like that. This would most likely be a past-paced entertaining game with multiple options scoring and playing as there were this year.