Is FRC giving high CG robots a free pass on defense?

[ToddF]

Just to throw a little wrinkle into this discussion, people should take the limited field visibility into account when intuiting driver intent based on robot actions. We played a match where one of our alliance partners (with a high CG) was tipped, and lost the match because of this. We review match video immediately after all our matches to critique our performance. The video showed what appeared to be an egregious instance of a defender purposefully tipping our partner. But, looking more closely, the tip happened when the defenders robot was in their drive team's blind spot. Rather than intentionally tipping, it's much more likely they were just trying to get their robot back into their view, and the high CG robot got in the way. The tippers probably were just as surprised as anyone when they found themselves on the receiving end of a yellow card.

In the first of the videos MBimrose16 posted, it appears that the view of the collision that resulted in the tip is blocked by the sally port door from both sides of the field. This theory is further supported by the fact that robots from both alliances then proceeded to ram into their tipped robot throughout the rest of the match. I can't believe this is intentional. It appears that the drivers simply can't see that spot in the field.

Again, in the second video, it looks like an egregious tip, but if the drivers of the red robot are in drivers station 1, their view of the robot-robot interaction is blocked by the tower. They might not have been able to see that they were tipping the blue bot. (They we not in station 1, as you can see when the ref gives the yellow card, and deserved the penalty.) Props, BTW, to the team who tried to get the flipped robot into the batter. It almost worked.

This visibility issue is the root cause for a lot of the seeming crazy "mistakes" you see drivers making this year. It's one reason why no one on any drive team wants to play this game with the drawbridges on the field.