Zone Arm damage

[Dreistul]

Here's a question about the zone arms that other threads are discussing:
If a opponent robot has a zone arm extended and it's blocking the movement of your robot or the goal (not entangled in either), if you move your robot through their arm and damage their arm, would you be disqualified for damaging the other robot, or will the judge overlook it as a bad design on their part? The robot (ALL of the robot) is supposed to be designed to take some abuse; standard pushing and shoving doesn't seem like a malicious act, even if it's done a flimsily designed zone arm.

Other thoughts?

[Matt Leese]

It's all going to depend on how the robot intersects with the arm. If you repeatedly ram the arm, that's probably not poor construction. If you run into it and it falls off or it can survive a pushing match, it's probably poor construction. A lot of it is going to come down to the opinion of the judges.

Matt

[Monkey]

The first strategy/robot type our team thought of doing was a one that would extend itself to block-off the playing field.

[Matt Ryan]

Accidental damage if you are merely trying to move across the playing field.

If repeatedly rammed, still not malicious--you're trying to get to the other side.

If broken, and then repeatedly rammed, then thats malicious.