get IN the zone

[Brandon Holley]

So the first week of regionals are over and from what I hear they were quite intense. I've had a question about "being in a loading zone" since week 1. So could someone that has been to/participated in a regional please tell me...what was being considered "in"?

[sburro]

from what I could tell at the Bae regional it was a part of the robot touching the triangle

[Stephen Kowski]

if some part of the robot is touching the triangle you are in the loading zone....not two wheels on either side and the frame hovering over it either....must be touching....

[Alex1072]

Just put a zip-tie skirt or piece of fabric between the front wheels. We had the small zipties hot-glued about an inch apart with our front cover screwed in over it, and we never got any triangle penalties. At least thats how it was at Sac.

[Alex Pelan]

There was a rather large dicussion about "load bearing surfaces" and what being in the loading zone was defined as, in this thread. The best solution to make sure that you are always in is anything that hangs off of your robot within the base, such as zipties. I didn't actually see a not-in-loading zone penalty at BAE in the matches that I watched, but I am fairly certain the Q & A in that thread is what they based their ruling on.

[Greg Young]

Make sure that whatever is touching the loading zone is obvious. We got a penalty in our first match even with zipties across the front of the bot. The ref said he didn't see them.

We decided to use the human loader and have our human player check to make sure we were on the plastic before loading the tetra. If we didn't have a wheel on the plastic the player ran back to the pressure pad and the driver adjusted the bot location. A 10 point penalty can easily decide a match.

[Gene F]

I was at Peach Tree this Saturday (Just watching) and noticed that there was a ref assigned to each pair of loading zones. When a robot "entered" the loading zone the ref would give a “thumbs up” signal. This seemed to work very well. It made the refs an aid to the teams rather than an evil villain waiting to issue penalties. Hats off to the Peach Tree Refs!