Team Update 1-15-2013

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Basel A

Vertical is the normal to the plane of the ground relative to a robot on the ground at the start of the match. Besides, notice that flop-bots and unfolding bots haven't been used since the current era of bumpers (2009+). You could just use bumpers..

G23-1 mentions verticalness in relation to the robot. Barring the degenerate case where the entire robot is always in a fixed orientation with respect to the ground, that's proof that we can't use the ground as the sole co-ordinate reference.

In terms of using bumper edges as the reference, there are similar issues. The bottom edge of a legal bumper can (in theory) be between 2.0 in and 5.5 in from the ground, meaning significant angles are possible.

Edit: I re-read your post, and may have misunderstood it the first time. Are you suggesting that we construct the robot-relative co-ordinate system based on something like the the starting bumper orientation and the ground normal? (Hopefully the floor protector doesn't figure into this.) Then, because the bumpers can't articulate, we can use them to observe the orientation of the robot-relative co-ordinates during the climb? That has interesting implications (like when bumpers fall off), but could be feasible. However, I don't think the rules support this interpretation to the exclusion of others.