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Originally Posted by Jason Morrella
For a robot to interact with and retrieve a tetra from a loading zone without incurring a penalty, it must:
A) Be TOUCHING (not new, this has been the case for 46 days now and before anyone started building a robot) the loading zone triangle
B) Be clearly and visibly touching the loading zone triangle
Take the baseball analogy - if a runner going from second to home only had to pass OVER third base and not touch it, both coaches would be sprinting out of the dugout on almost every play to argue with the umpire that the player was or wasn't over the corner tip of the base. FIRST refs will be much more comfortable with their judgment that they visibly saw part of the robot touching than the would be with their judgment that a part of a robot may or may not have been over an inch or two of the tip of the loading zone triangle - especially since they aren't hovering over the interaction looking down from above.
What I do disagree with is the thought that this is a train wreck about to happen, that the sky is falling, and so on. I predict this is what will happen this year, teams will realize "wow - we (or they) got a 30 point penalty (ouch) for hitting the a robot while it was in the loading zone. We don't want that to happen again, let's not drive anywhere close to the loading zones of the other alliances whenever they have a robot in that area".
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I'm not taking either side on this issue, because we can work with it either way. I'm cool with the touching requirement. However, I feel like the baseball analogy is slightly different than our case here.
A baseball players legs are fully visible to everyone that has their eyeballs open, and you can see them from all angles. But a FIRST ref standing on the right side of a robot isn't easily going to see what's happen on the left side of the robot when there's a full robot body, side panels, etc on it. Few robots have ever been completely clear and have huge wheels easily viewable.
I think the biggest issue is that having an entire robot straddling and obviously sitting on top of the triangle is not considered in, because the distance between their wheels happens to be bigger than the triangle. I don't know that anyone has wanted to dangle a robot part over the triangle and call it in, as in the baseball analogy. Yes - that would be difficult to call (did he pass over the corner of the base, etc). It's when a robot is on top of a triangle such that the triangle itself is not visible, seems odd that
that is not considered in. A stranger could stand 4-8ft away and tell you that it's obviously in, even if something underneath isn't touching. But if he's on the right side of the robot, and my robot is touching such that he could have
obviously seen if he was on the
left side of the robot, then standing on the right, he may not see that. I would hate to see a ref tripping over himself to rush to the left side to verify.... safety first..
I think it was also frustrating that it was 2/16/05 when the drivebase/drivetrain was defined as being inside the 28x38 dimensions. While I don't know there will be a lot of teams with this issue, it could significantly affect those that do. It went from "touching", to "being obvious", to "a part of the 28x38 base touching". I'd like to think common sense in conjunction with rules will be used when making the "in" calls. But there is inconsistency in common sense also.
I don't think that this will be a train wreck either. I have also said before that I think when you see a robot near it's loading zone, don't even think about going near it, to avoid a huge penalty. I think teams will be able to correct along the way. If you have issues with the autoload side, work the HP side to death... at least you won't get a penalty for accidentally touching the tetra before touching the triangle.
In hindsight, "in" could be defined as "touching the triangle, or obviously straddling/covering/sitting over the triangle (if the intent was to obviously be in a designated load area). But I guess the intent of the rule was to be touching the triangle in a manner that a ref can see from no matter where he's standing, even though that
could almost be physically impossible, unless your whole robot is clear. I hope regionals are able to recruit minimum 10 refs/match - that's not even an exxagerated number.
And I thought the bird story was humorous....yet true.
Eh - We'll see how it goes, live and learn.