Rule G22 needs to be changed

[jason_zielke]

Originally Posted by TubaMorg

Here is the most important point of this discussion. If the rule were changed then just as many penalties would be called because teams would knowingly cross back partially but sometimes cross too far.

I would have to disagree with this point. I have been at Midwest for the last 2 days and have never seen a robot that crossed a line because they were trying to interntionally go backwards. I have seen robots with drivers that have little or no experience and struggle to control the robot crossing a line by 1/2" and then breaking the plane resulting in a penalty. We are putting a ton of pressure on the student drivers if we are expecting them to control a robot in a high stress situation, looking 50 feet down a field through multiple layers of lexan (that is reflecting in all kinds of funny ways) and keep from crossing a line backwards with no tolerance for error. In many cases, they can't even tell if they have crossed the line or not.

I am lucky to have an exceptional drive team, but I am sympathetic to those teams that have inexperienced drive teams.

By not penalizing until to robot completely crosses back across the line, you give the the drivers the length of the robot to recognize their error and correct it. This seems much more in the spirit of the game and of the mission of FIRST than penalizing a tiny error.