Important 80 inches!!!

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by Laaba 80

So what happens if a penalty is called on your team for extending past 80in? I see where you are coming from, however this is one thing that the refs wouldnt have needed to worry about. It would be alot easier for the inspection crew to measure the rubuts full length than try to measure robot speed.
Joey

It depends on the circumstance. Our robot has a two-jointed arm, and if the wrist and shoulder are both straight out, we violate the rule. In proper operation, the software allows two shoulder states, up and down, which have their exact position chosen to make it impossible for us to go over 80" no matter what the position of the wrist is*. The software also controls the transition between these two states, so the wrist can't extend too far then either. For us to violate the 80" rule it we would have to either have a code error (which would be very obvious and result in us hitting the e-stop immediately given how dangerous our arm can be), or fall over. There isn't anything we can do about preventing the falling over problem, which affects any robot that uses an arm or forklift to hurdle. Anyway, my point is that in either case it would be very obvious that we had exceeded the limit and would go along with the ref's decision.

*Those that saw our robot at VCU will note that this is not how our arm acted. We were having mysterious bugs with our PID loop for the shoulder joint, which forced us to go over to fully manual control for all of our matches (we finally got it working while eliminations were being played). So, at VCU, we could have violated the 80" rule if our arm driver had messed up. If that had happened, we would again not protest the ref's decision because they have a much better view of our robot's profile than we do from the player's station.