Let’s say you’re a robot and you want to get rid of the 2X balls. You have to cap a goal. If you place a 2X out of the playing field it will be returned. But what if your team wanted the ball out of the game. You could put it into the ball release, no?
You could try, but if I remember correctly, the gate that holds the balls into the corrall stays open after the balls drop, so it would just roll back down.
Cory
The gate does stay down. However, I think you could actually place the ball right on the gate. The gate looks to be be parallel with the floor and not angled down (like it probably should). This issue caused problems at the BAE regional, a volunteer would have to shake a support pole violently to try to get stuck balls to fall onto the playing field.
I believe at all the regionals I have attended (re: NJ, and UTC) that the door on the corral fell and was perpendicular with the playing field (darn gravity).
I guess your field up in BAE must have been broken!!
I think that also if you try to put the ball up there, then that would be considered going out of bounds and may be at the ref’s discretion to disable your robot.
UCF’s field the door fell to a horizontal position. Either way back to the begining of this thread. It would be really hard to balance that ball there.
Mike,
I was on Field Reset all three days at BAE, the only day we needed to shake the pole was on Thursday, the pratice day. All other days it worked flawlessly to my receloction.
-Aaron
Attached is a pic of our drive team in operation in Annapolis. You get a pretty good shot of the ball release. For the purpose of this thread, let’s assume that the ball release can support a 2x ball. Is it a good strategy, or even legal?
The only rule I would be concerned with is The out of bounds rule that I previously mentioned.
It may also be deemed a safety issue as well. We very well don’t want a robot to drop the ball over the wall and on to the drivers while trying to put it up there.
That is, if you COULD do it with the door being how it is.
Right, you would be going out of bounds. But doesn’t the rule allow you to go out of bounds? I think you are only disabled if your robot touches the ground or there is a safety concern.
A rule states that a robot may not cross the top of the 7’ wall. I would assume that since the big ball is part of the robot, when being held by it (As I recall from an update/Q&A, I think), they would disable your robot for crossing the plane of the 7’ wall.
Cory
The out of bounds rule says if your robot has to put force on something outside the playing field to return to play it will be disabled. Its pretty much reffering to landing on the carpet outside the field or getting a hook stuck on the railing/steel cable, etc…
The time it would take you to balance the ball up there is probably not even worth it, why not just push the ball deep into a goal if you want it not to be used?
A rule states that a robot may not cross the top of the 7’ wall. I would assume that since the big ball is part of the robot, when being held by it (As I recall from an update/Q&A, I think), they would disable your robot for crossing the plane of the 7’ wall.
The ball is an extension of the robot when its being held, so according to that you would be disabled.
I beleive it is illegal to reach into the ball release, in the rule dealing w/ the ball corrals it says it is illegal to break the plane of the diamond plate, which in theory, extends into infinity. So I doubt you are allowed to reach into the ball realease. Also, teachnically that is out of bounds, and all large balls going out of bound must be returned…
Ahh, the prodigal son speaks… And it actually makes sense. 
Yeah, that sounds about right, even if you were able to do that, it would more than likely be returned back into play.
It was a good idea while it lasted though.
And the dream dies. Thanks Cory and everyone else for your help. The second you think you have found a loophole in the rules, FIRST is already two steps ahead.
You would also at least get a 10pt penalty for crossing the plane of the player station. If not disabled because that would be deliberate it happened to several teams in the Midwest regional I remember 45 doing it a few times.
Yeah if you break the plane of the 7ft wall with your robot or ball held by the robot, it’s a 10pt penalty each time, not dq. We got that penalty twice in one match (within a few seconds of each other) due to a little craziness while driving in that area… No harm done…
I was watching those matchs thanx to the live web cast and it didnt even look like your fault a few times u were pused while holding the ball up there
Looked more like the ball crossed the plane, not your actual arm–they changed the rules to say the yellow ball is only part of your robot in the cases of goaltending/assisting balls to goals. Hmmm…
You know, I believe you’re right. If only the 2x ball crossed the wall plane, I don’t think we should have gotten a penalty (2 actually). And, even if our robot was pushed so that we crossed the wall plane, the pushing robot should have gotten the penalty. We would have lost that match anyways by 10pts, even without 3 penalties against our alliance.
We also had a match where we were disabled due to the 2x ball in our arm touching the floor outside the field. Although the ref told us that was the reason we were disabled, I’m not sure that’s right (2x not being part of our robot in that case). However, it probably would have been deemed unsafe anyways even though we probably could have gotten ourselves back up…
Oh well!! Life goes on…
Edit - Found out we actually did touch the carpet with our robot arm, but it was also a safety concern for the volunteer crew sitting right there.
Hmm… I think FIRST should set a presedence on the ball holding situation. There shouldn’t be cases. Either the ball is or is not a part of your robot. Period.
My reccomendation would be that the ball is not part of the robot. I can’t even think of a situation where it would make sense to call the ball a part of a robot.