So my team is friends with 1816 the second pick of alliance 2 in the Galileo division at champs. And boy did they have a lot to say about the result of quarters 3. Near the start of the tiebreaker another teams robot came from the other side of the field full speed at Robonauts and damaged the cylinders that control their intake.
This meant that they could not take in balls because their intake was stuck in the up position. the incident was clearly reckless driving so the opposing alliance should have gotten disqualified for it (they already had a yellow card) however the ref missed it and 118 did not immediately go up to the judges after the match to put it in review. this resulted in the loss of the match for the alliance ending their season so all of the teams were furious and while they should have talked to the judges right after they didn’t so the loss stayed. What are other people’s opinions of this?
Calls get missed! This is certainly an unfortunate miss, but whether anybody went to the question box or not, the end result certainly would’ve been the same. The Head Ref absolutely would’ve said “Sorry we didn’t see it”.
Seems like a great situation for members of 1732, 118, 1816, 316 and others to advocate for some form of either video replay, or other means of enabling Head Refs to make post match calls in significant situations.
I think there’s an argument that it could add a significant amount of time to an event, also if event video is unreliable then there would be an element of inequality between teams that can afford to film the event.
It was an offseason I believe, no inseason has. Offseason events would likely have teams who don’t care quite as much about the results and would be less likely to contest results. Not that this invalidates the experiment, but its definitely not identical to inseason events.
Independent of the missed call, that’s a fairly impressive bit of damage. I’ve typically associated 118 with robots that lean more to the spindly side of things, but the fact that the cylinder body and rod were the failure point is pretty impressive. It’s a testament to the intakes of both teams.
Hey Nathan, thanks for bringing this up. I know many people came by and saw this damage before leaving Saturday. I just wanted to come in and set the record straight.
I am the drive coach for 118. I immediately asked our human player, Marcus, to go to the question box while our driver, Ryan, and I removed the robot from the field. We immediately knew what had happened and that the referee in the back left corner of the field had not called a foul for the interaction. It was a textbook case of a G205-B infraction, which would have resulted in a tech foul, yellow card, and our win in the QF series against the seventh seed alliance as they were already carrying a yellow going into this third match.
The head ref addressed Marcus and I believe a student from 1732, but ultimately the score was posted before any investigation beyond “the ref didn’t see it”. We were still discussing when the score went up. I think there must have been extreme pressure on the volunteers to stay on schedule. It is not clear to me what the purpose of the question box is. The head ref came and looked at our broken robot, but had not seen the interaction himself, so was not inclined to investigate further. I do not know if he asked the referee who was watching the interaction about what had happened.
Our intake was stuck up for the remainder of the match so we had to switch to playing defense, and we could not climb when we tried to as the stuck intake kept the turret from turning to a position which would clear the climber.
I told our drive team that the referee’s calls or lack thereof are not in our control. At this point we have to let it go. This was called incorrectly and it ended our season prematurely. We’re not alone.
The referees are humans; passionate, dedicated, and hard-working ones at that. I’d like to thank the Galileo referee crew for a clean 10 qualification matches of officiating.
This damage was probably not immediately obvious to even the most attentive referee. That IS in teams’ control. If (god forbid) G204/G205 remain the same in the coming seasons, I’d recommend teams allocate space and weight to protective shields mounted around their frame perimeter, which break off under hard hits. It’s the least we can do to give referees a fighting chance at calling these rules as written.
Maybe this isn’t the thread for this but would this violate that rule that says something like “Don’t intentionally detach parts”? On one hand, you aren’t intentionally detaching, but is designing for intentionally detaching also breaking the rule? An honest, non-accusatory question.
i really think there might have been more G205s called for nonfunctional panels coming off than for real robot damage. Something needs to change. I don’t know what it is. But teams are right to protect themselves.
In early 2019 right before the referees started really calling deliberate contact we had robots drive inside of us but “Since you can still move and nothing broke” they called it deliberate but not damaging since back then it apparently had to be both.
We proceeded to put a tall very thin item covered in red tape on the very edge of our frame perimeter so it was super obvious when someone entered as they would bend it in half or break it thus it was deliberate and damaging. This was deemed perfectly legal now this may have been because the head ref did not approve of our original suggestion of putting a giant open bowl of green glitter on the inside of our robot and letting any robots who reached inside of our frame get covered in it, so we had proof of said interaction.
Point is I don’t want to put stupid stuff on my frame perimeter but if that is what I have to do to prevent stuff like this then I will.
Broken pieces on the carpet isn’t enough. We had 2 large (3" by 6") pieces knocked off our robot after a hit in our first match. No penalty was called. These pieces were designed to protect our swerve module and did their job and the module suffered no damage, but the rules still indicate a penalty should have been called.
I think short of a robot no longer driving, there isn’t much that can be done to ensure that all inside frame perimeter contact is called.
It’s certainly not to remedy any wrongs that were done to you during a match. I’d wager to say that in almost all cases the results are shown before the question box interaction is concluded. Has anyone ever had something changed during a match after protesting? I can’t think of any.
In practice the best you can hope for is that the refs pay more attention to the thing they missed in future matches, after you bring it to their attention. Certainly doesn’t help you on a season ending call though.
After standing in the question box for 10 matches, 503 got a match result overturned where their disabled partner got 96 points in penalties for “pinning” another disabled robot after being pushed into them
I’m very shocked this was overturned. Do we know what the rational was?
Edit: further elaboration because I feel people will disagree with me here. The original pin was intentional, they got one pin foul by not driving away, then they died in legal contact before clearing their pin. It’s a very harsh penalty but a pretty cut and dry rule interpretation.
I’m not a ref, but here’s my devil’s advocate take.
G202 *There’s a 5-count on PINS. ROBOTS may not PIN an opponent’s ROBOT for more than 5
seconds. A ROBOT is PINNING if it is preventing the movement of an opponent ROBOT by
contact, either direct or transitive (such as against a FIELD element). A ROBOT is considered
PINNED until the ROBOTS have separated by at least 6 ft. (~183 cm) from each other, either
ROBOT has moved 6 ft. from where the PIN initiated, or the PINNING ROBOT gets PINNED,
whichever comes first. The PINNING ROBOT(S) must then wait for at least 3 seconds before
attempting to PIN the same ROBOT again.
One could argue that the disabled robot is not having its movement prevented as it could not move even without the opposing robot touching it. Based on the second sentence it would not meet the definition pinning.
The fact that 7072 was pushed into 4944 while both robots were disabled could also have played a factor. Worth noting that we can only speculate here, as we were not part of the discussion. I wouldn’t go as far as to call the initial pin “intentional”, given that it was in a blind spot, but from what I can see, it does look like a pin that was reasonable for the ref to call.
Refs typically aren’t expected to keep track of whether or not a robot is disabled. They may have only learned that both robots were disabled after it was brought up in the question box.
