New Defensive Strategy?

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Peter,
From 2006 "The Game"
<G22> Intentional ROBOT - ROBOT Interaction - Strategies aimed solely at the destruction, damage, tipping
over, or entanglement of ROBOTs are not in the spirit of the FIRST Robotics Competition and are not
allowed.

Originally Posted by GDC

From <G22> of the 2006 Manual
• Contact with a tilted robot such that the contact is outside the bumper zone will generally be
considered incidental contact.

I was specifically referring to the loophole above exploited by many teams that pretty much allowed any interaction on the ramp. Teams would push a robot up the ramp and back away allowing the robot to fall over. Pushing a robot driving up the ramp over backwards was also frequently done. Both were never called for penalties all season because it was a difficult judgement to make as to whether or not it was intentional. Also the maximum penalty for tipping a robot also from <G22> was 5 pts. As a trade off was nothing compared to knocking a robot out of the match. This was the specific reason yellow and red cards were eventually introduced.