[jgannon]

In one of our matches in Sacramento, a team was holding a tetra very high, trying to cap the middle goal against the driver wall, and it kept swinging from over the goal to over the wall. Our driver bumped their robot in an attempt to keep them from capping, but eventually they were able to cap the goal. After the match, the referee came to us and said that if the opposing robot had dropped the tetra over the wall, we would have been disqualified from not just the match, but the regional. Admittedly, it was a poor idea to bump them in such a hazardous situation, but it seems to me that if a robot is endangering the drivers, then they ought to be immediately disabled because of the strong probability that they will come into contact with another robot. During the elimination rounds, a similar situation happened to two other teams, and the tetra actually smacked into the outside of the driver station wall, causing the drivers to let go of the joysticks and reach up to push the tetra and robot back over the wall. Again, the robot was not disabled. A 10 point penalty doesn't seem like a good idea to me (not to mention that it isn't in the rules), but disabling the robot and threatening to DQ would help to keep everyone safe.