Pre-Game rules

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Demothesis

Do you get to choose where you place your robot, and do the referees move your robot prior to the start of the game? This is important for our team's autonomous section, if you hadn't guessed.

If you use an external alignment device (e.g. a tape measure not part of the robot), the head referee may arbitrarily reposition your robot. Otherwise, yes, you may choose any position in the home zone with the long dimension upward and the orange indicator light visible from the front (i.e. pointed downfield, toward the rack).

In elimination rounds, the higher-seeded alliance will be allowed to have the last opportunity to orient their robots (according to <T16>). There's a little bit of confusion as to how this is supposed to apply in qualification matches. Per this Q&A response, FIRST says that teams are not seeded until the qualifying round is complete, and therefore <T16> doesn't apply to qualifying matches. However, section 9.3.3 says that "[t]he scoring system will use the combination of qualifying score and ranking score to continuously determine the seeding of teams during the qualification matches." Furthermore, 9.3.10 supports this by describing the seeding algorithm and stating that "[a]ll teams in attendance will be seeded during the qualification matches." These portions of the rules imply that seeding varies continuously during the qualifying matches (i.e. <T16> must be applied in all matches, because the rule doesn't specify different procedures for qualifying and elimination matches). Note also that the rules don't specify a procedure for determining the higher-seeded alliance during qualifying (highest-seeded alliance member, sum of alliance members' seedings, or some other method), probably because whoever wrote this rule intended it to apply in the eliminations only (where alliance captains are defined), but did not specify that condition in the rule itself.

As a practical matter, the list of rankings wasn't conveniently available to the head referee in the past (it would require changing screens on the scoring system, which wasn't always feasible in the Hatch system, especially if the big-screen A/V feed was connected to the second monitor). If that situation continues, it won't be easy for the referees and field supervisor to find out who is higher-ranked, and inform the alliances.