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Originally Posted by Dan Swando
I cannot speak for the other referees, but I was personally repremanding teams that I saw had a repetative nature of running cross-field and slamming into whatever was there. Each team that I talked to changed their programming to let up at the last second to allow for another robot being there.
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I'm not aware if you spoke to our team or not Dan, but here's what we did and why:
We were intentionally trying to knock the autonomous 3 pt shooters off target, before they started shooting. This required us to notice/guess where they were going to be and when they would be there. We also had to account for their alliance partner coming between us to block us or knock us off course. What we knew was our speed in each gear - we didn't have shaft encoders or a yaw rate sensor hooked up (yet) so we had to program a distance based on time. As you can imagine that's a pretty big window to account for all of the unknowns. To expect programming to "let up" is rather optimistic - if you're already travelling at 12 fps, letting off the gas isn't going to slow down a 145 pound robot much as far as impact momentum. We've got plenty of power to push other robots around, but we needed the speed to compensate for all the stuff that the robot can't sense in autonomous.
But we did set a limit; our concern was if we missed their robot and ran full bore into the field railing that we would topple over out of bounds. Again, in the finals the robot we were trying to knock off target remained in the starting box so that gave us a better window for aim but not much for distance, especially if their alliance partner tried to block us.
Team 86 (Resistance) had an excellent autonomous in that they changed their shooting position on the field so we couldn't predict where to aim.
I don't see how you can call any robot with regulation bumpers for ramming - as Ken said it's only a couple g's and certainly can't fit the intent of the rule which is to penalize intentional damage, not defense.