45 Degree rule...

[Chris Hibner]

Originally posted by Ken Leung
Bottom line, I think enough robots will be planning to lift goal(s) slightly for more traction that this ruling won't affect too much design out there. It just provide an easy way for teams (probably beginner teams and rookies) to add more traction onto their drive train. And I think most teams expected other teams to lift up those goals for traction anyway.

Not too big of a deal, I think. What do everyone else think?

I think this rule change is a big problem (similar to the "Poor Man's Balance" rule of last year).

Teams that do a good job of designing a robot to conform to the original ruling should be rewarded for doing so. Now, every team can lift the goals with very little ingenuity. Teams that were only planning on pulling the goals closer to their robot can now throw on a ramp and Voila!, intant lifting. Meanwhile team 45 (just as an example - I have no idea what they're really doing) has spent the last three weeks trying to design a good mechanism to lift the goals. All of this effort to gain an advantage has now been negated because now anyone can use a simple ramp. If they had known this from the beginning, they might have put their design efforts in another area.

I'm all for a game that allows small inexperienced teams to have a role, but there should definitely be a difficult task that separates the good teams from the great teams.

-Chris