Animation text

[Josh Goodman]

If anyone needs a quick overview of the game, or can't find the animation, here's the text for it.

Animation Overview



Welcome to the 2007 FIRST robotics competition and this year’s game: Rack and Roll.
This year’s game is played on a 27 by 54 foot carpeted field. Two alliances of three teams each are located at the end of the field from where they operate their robots.
The center of the field is occupied by a scoring structure known as the rack. Three levels of scoring locations known as spiders are located within the rack. Each spider hangs from a series of chains that allows it to translate and move freely if it’s impacted by a robot or game piece.
The game pieces are inflatable plastic pool tubes. There are three types of game pieces. Keepers are placed during the autonomous period. Ringers are placed during the tele-operated period and score points for the alliance. And the black spoiler tubes are used to negate the effects of the ringers. The objective of the game is to place the keepers and the ringers into rows. The rows can be either horizontal or vertical.
The match starts with a 15 second autonomous period. Robots can use onboard sensors to help locate target lights which will help identify the location of the scoring targets. As the autonomous period ends, robots must drop any keepers still in their possession.
The human operators now step forward and take control of the robots. Robots return their home zone to receive ringers from the human players. The ringers can be strategically placed on the rack. Alternately, robots can drive to the far end of the field to retrieve ringers that are waiting in the opponent’s home zone. In either case, the robots attempt to make as many rows as possible. Here, we see a red robot placing a ringer, completing a vertical row of three and a horizontal row of two. His alliance partner then places another ringer extending the row to three.
Black spoiler tubes may be placed on the rack and used negate the effects of the ringers. Unlike the other game pieces, spoilers can be moved. They can be picked up and relocated to cover any other ringer on the rack.
As the match draws to a close, robots will race back to their home zones. Bonus points will be awarded for each of the alliance robots that are elevated off the floor. The value of the bonuses is modified by the height above the floor.
The final score is determined by the length and the number of rows created by game pieces and added to the bonus points. In this example, blue squeaks out a win over red, 90 to 84. Good luck and we’ll see you at the competitions.