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I am curious - what has in fact been the performance record of the "kidnapper" bots at the Regionals so far? This thread has had a good bit of speculation and opinion, but what has actually happened?
I don't mean trapping an opponent in your home zone and blocking him till the buzzer, and I don't mean pushing him into the home zone. I mean either picking up the opponent and carrying - with a "forklift" that goes underneath - or grappling and dragging with a gripper of some kind.
There was a really neat looking fork bot in the pits near us at UTC/NE (sorry, guys, I forget your number), but I didn't see it manage to pull off an abduction during any of the matches.
Finally - my opinion/attitude - it's a made-up game with arbitrary rules. It's a design space. Anything and EVERYTHING in the design space is fair game. To impose one's own restrictions on some things in the space as being unprofessional or ungracious is to be unprepared. The rules regarding kidnapping were there at the beginning (unlike some other unfortunate examples this year), they were questioned/discussed/interpreted/clarified early on, and they were not subsequently modified or rescinded. The possible consequences of the kidnapping rules are simply part of the game this year. When we designed our bot, we accepted that we should not have delicate hardware exposed on the underneath side, such that forks or a platform poked under there and lifting would cause serious damage.
We were not HAPPY about this whole kidnapping thing, and we worried about the RISK of (unintentional) damage, but we could not afford to ignore the possibility of robots being designed to play a kidnapping strategy. In fact, one of the really neat things about FIRST is that virtually anything that the rules allow almost inevitably WILL show up in some team's robot. Seeing the amazingly creative executions, and then watching how the strategies play out in the matches is a blast. I've always thought that cruising the pits beats every hot rod show I've ever seen.
Dodd
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