Minibot's triggering targets?

[Kevin Sevcik]

That's what I'm wondering as well. My completely ancedotal and likely biased evidence is that it was mostly lightweight bots at Alamo that were failing to trigger towers. I can only trust that correct calls were being made per the rules as written, but I'm doubting refs can or are capable of visually judging the force exerted by the minibot on the plate.

What I am certain of is that the current lack of information can only lead to confusion and hurt feelings. When a team loses an important match due to a "phantom" minibot deployment, they're going to be rather annoyed. If someone from the gdc or elsewhere could clear this up it'd save a lot of hurt feelings and comparisons to the infamous "tape measure" rule.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

That's what I'm wondering as well. My completely ancedotal and likely biased evidence is that it was mostly lightweight bots at Alamo that were failing to trigger towers. I can only trust that correct calls were being made per the rules as written, but I'm doubting refs can or are capable of visually judging the force exerted by the minibot on the plate.

What I am certain of is that the current lack of information can only lead to confusion and hurt feelings. When a team loses an important match due to a "phantom" minibot deployment, they're going to be rather annoyed. If someone from the gdc or elsewhere could clear this up it'd save a lot of hurt feelings and comparisons to the infamous "tape measure" rule.

Yeah, I've got similar concerns. While I of course appreciate the difficulty of making the mechanism trip reliably, the rule is written such that it's not the contact of the minibot upon the pressure plate, nor the force, but rather the act of tripping the sensor that completes the act of triggering (and ends that minibot's race).

If the refs are calling mere contact, they're doing it wrongly. And yet, it's impossible for them to do it right if the sensors aren't working—and nearly impossible to do the next best thing, which is render an accurate estimate of the sensors' states.

Referees can estimate the force (based upon the estimate published by FIRST), or guess at the deflection (approximately 0.25 in is necessary), or use some other proxy for triggering—but according to the rules, all that matters is that "the sensors are tripped and a signal is sent to the Field Management System". If the sensor doesn't trip because of some aspect of the design of the tower, then the alternatives are field fault (if it should have tripped), or no call (so that may be a feature, not a bug). For a given minibot design, how do you know which is the correct outcome? And on top of that, there are four towers, and the order matters! How do you judge all four at once?

I don't blame the refs—this one needs a rule change to grant them the liberty to make a different call (i.e. to allow them to call it based on contact alone).*

And of course, if a hostbot causes the sensor to trip by contact with the base, it isn't triggered, and in an ideal circumstance, the field should still allow the minibot race to take place on that tower, and allow the sensor to be tripped properly. If a minibot is prevented from concluding its race...I would have to call that a field fault too. (An insufficient degree of fault tolerance changed the final score of the match.)

*Can they bend the rules in the best interests of the competition? Maybe just a bit...because their objectives include some sort of equity. But that will end well only if FIRST is on board. Referees (more than inspectors) have to really be careful about this, because of the increased exposure and shorter timeframe available for deliberation.