At the Colorado School of Mines, the Colorado School of Mines Robotics Club is planning on organizing and creating Colorado’s first official full-size off-season FRC competition, calling it “Mines Mayhem”.
What’s the difference with “Mines Mayhem”? It all boils down to robot robustness, we’re editing the rules about impeding, hurdler interference, what makes a hurdle a hurdle(as in like say FRC 190 decides to come all the way to Colorado, they don’t have to let go of the ball, it just needs to hit the ground but, pinning track ball and capturing the opponents trackballs, I don’t know we’ll see, it’s all still in discussion within the club.) cough cough G22 cough cough*…some rules will be eliminated, some rules altered…so, shoving, pushing, ramming, is very more than likely allowed…if you could build your bot, you should be able to fix it or improvise.
We’re looking at holding the competition in the Steinhauer Fieldhouse on the Colorado School of Mines Campus in Golden, CO. With the amount of space, it looks to be room enough to hold a field and at least 48 teams.
Colorado teams are more than welcome to register and out of state teams are extremely more than welcome to come and participate too. This will be the first time we see something like this in Colorado, so we’ll need help to make it successful.
We may or may not have an entry fee, it will depend because the Colorado School of Mines does not help out the CSM Robotics Club in any way(and if they do, it’s not significant), so we’re hoping that if we run “Mines Mayhem”, certain representatives could come and see and say “Wow, you were right all along, this program is worth it and we’ll help”. If we do have a fee, we will more than likely not go above $200. And if we do have a fee and a team wants to participate but cannot pay the registration fee, then it can be discussed in discretion between the team coach and I or the CSM Robotics Club President.
Also, this is to help out teams who are recruiting rookie members and can take them to an semi-real FIRST event so they get a small better taste of what to expect for next coming season.
This is a little bit of what we have so far, it’s not finalized yet because we need to see if any teams would be interested in coming and participating.
E-Mail me at [email protected] or [email protected] if you are interested and if you have any questions. or even just PM me.
Also, we’ll probably have our club members volunteer to help run it but for positions such as referee, scorekeeper, I would like to get volunteers who ref during the 2008 on-season if possible.
Our CSM Robotics Club is made up of mostly FRC veterans from Colorado, Wyoming, Illinois, Washington, and etc…so when we run this event, we have a very good idea on what students would find fun(also receiving input from teams we mentored this recent season on what they want in the competition)…also at the Colorado School of Mines through the CSM Robotics Club, you can receive up 7 college credits if you mentor a FRC team during the on-season.
Other stuff:
It’s very possible we can record all the match videos and that the event will be webcasted, so out of state teams, your family and friends back home can check it out.
The event will be a three day event just like a real regional…
Event will probably held 3 of these 4 days (October 11 - 14)
Possible Alterations in discussion:
Alliances will have four teams…
Three trackballs per alliance - if a trackball leaves the field, it’s permanently off the field for the rest of the match, so hmmm…defensive strategy?
Autonomous lengthen to a whole minute so we really encourage teams to come out with autonomous - blocking will be allowable, but so is high-speed ramming - Autonomous will have a large point bonus
Robocoaches allowed to position themselves to where the bot can recieve the signal? - hmmm…
Eliminations…just a tad bit more intense(more detail later on why fi we can get this event going)
and more…
(of course, entanglement of arms, intentional damage, and rules as such will probably be the same and be enforced, because as rough as we plan this event to be, we don’t want the damage to be as bad as something like battlebots.)