I was today at Simley High School in Minnesota to see my and other teams showing off their robots. It was very interesting and there were a few teams that will definitely be able to stack many many totes.
However, it turned out that driving over litter is not always a good idea. I saw two teams who got stuck by driving over litter, at the end it turned out that the noodles suffered a lot by it. They were torn, one of them left a lot of real litter on the arena. I am not sure how such a case will be handled by the rules, but I would recommend to avoid them or having a mechanism to securely push them away. Maybe it will be counted as an attempt to damage the materials…
at our scrimmage we cut a litter in half by getting it caught in our chains with a high traction tank drive we never go stuck on them but there was alot of teams that were getting stuck on them. i did not like it how the litter was being thrown right at the beginning of the game instead of the last 20 ecounds.
The rule is that you can’t throw it in the last 20 seconds, you must throw it before the last 20 seconds. I agree that it should be thrown closer to the end of the match though so it gets less in the way. I also don’t see why that rule is there, but it is a rule.
As a general rule of thumb, though, if you’re damaging Litter (to the point of being removed from play) just by driving over it, you might have a problem with the whole “repeated” part. At the very least, consider a minor redesign.
One team at the scrimmage I was at actually removed their Litter guards after “ingesting” a noodle. Suddenly they didn’t damage any Litter when driving over it… Another one apparently made a store run and came back with an actual broom.
