As I am sure many people have seen over this initial weekend, the alliance flags seem to be more of an annoyance than anything else.
The flags seemed to be the only parts of robots that were constantly being “capped” making it almost impossible for the team to score during the rest of the match without violating the single tube possession rule. There was even one occurance of two tubes being placed over the flag(all by accident…usually by the human player).
Also the flags barely (if ever) stayed on the robots. I saw so many flags thrown around the field without any care as to if it fell off of the robot or not.
I understand that the flag is NOT considered part of the robot…but that point doesnt matter with the definition of a robot in control of a ringer. I believe that FIRST needs to address this issue or teams will try anything they feel is within the rules to “avoid” this catastrophe.
This problem lead some teams to avoid it by taking a very loose interpretation of rule
R15: the FLAG is approximately vertical and the top of the FLAG is a minimum of 18 inches higher than any point on the central mass or
structure of the ROBOT
I saw a few instances were the flag simple “hid” behind an arm and only stuck above it an inch or two. These robots had little or no problems…while others who had a strict interpretation of the rules got hammered.
I feel that this causes a great decrease in game play when a team has to “shake” until a ringer hopefully falls off of their flag.
I am personally looking at update 16 to make at least some mention of this problem.
Am I to understand that all of these ringers going onto flags are as a result of the human players getting trigger-happy, or are these being put on by opponents (at which point <G09> as amended by Team Update #2 kicks in)?
Teams are just going to have to be careful on this one, and make sure they’ve mounted the flag holder at the right height; expect to see me at Chesapeake with a ruler.
I noticed at the VCU regional that one robot had it’s flag holder on its ramp and when it deployed the flag went with it.
Another bot had its flag tilted back about 35 degrees.
I’ll be expecting all flags to be in the correct orientation at Boilermaker.
Trust me, the referees do not look on the flags as annoyances. It is the only way, in the heat of the match, for the referees to keep track of who is on what alliance. You don’t have time to stop and think, “okay, team xxx is blue so I need to penalize them for being in the wrong end zone.” All you have time for is to think “I see a blue flag in the wrong end zone”.
There is a very easy way to secure the flag. For the last two years or more (I know it’s a rule violation) we have used DK’s favorite material, surgical tubing, to secure the flag in the holder. We simply drill 1/4" diameter holes through opposite sides of the PVC Tubing centered on the top of the tube and tie a short piece of surgical tubing through the holes. The flag stays put very well. I am not sure why inspectors allowed it or didn’t see it as we passed inspection, maybe they liked the idea of knowing our flag would stay put and make their job easier. This year we left it off for fear of a penalty for continually violating the same rule. Has any one else ever seen/used this method? Would anyone else like to see this become a requirement on the robot? Anything this simple that helps identify alliances should be allowed. I do not remember who on our team thought of it, but I believe it was one of the kids.
We were victims of a tube being thrown over the flag by an alliance partner, but it happened to other teams as well. We were told that if the red team threw the tube on a blue robot, that wouldn’t count against the blue team, but if the red team threw it on a red robot, it does count as a tube already in possession and the robot cannot pick up another tube.
Just another comment - one of our alliance partners had a bumper tear - that piece of fabric hung down from the bot and was less than the 4 inches off the ground, so our 15 bonus points for ramping didn’t count. We lost the match (quarter final, last game) by 10 points. If you have fabric bumpers, check them carefully between matches.
We also had problems with ramps deploying in the home zone, and then trying to spin around to get back into the home zone facing the right direction… be careful out there
Trigger happy HP’s. No reason to throw all 9 ringers at the rack in the first 20 seconds of a match. At BAE only 4 ringers were scored by HPs in 80 matches. Teams like 175 and 296 were feeding one at a time to their machine and they went pretty far…
1 match at NJ on Friday, team 103, the cybersonics, had 2 tubes accidentally thrown over their flag by the human players on their side and they continued to place tubes without penalty. The refs made an excellent assessment of that situation and decided they were not intentionally in possession of those tubes.
If that was true, it was totally against one of the updates that came out. They should have only been able to place a ringer they had in their possession at the time their flagpole was ringered. The update even mentioned that the robot could free the ringer itself, or have an alliance robot do it.
Now, if you meant the flag was ringered by the opponents, then yes, that doesn’t count as being in possession.
Well it happened to us, 1279 twice (in NJ) and we were assigned penalties the first time. The second time we stopped placing tubes, and went back to the home zone. After that, we lowered the flag flush with the top of our arm structure, with the inspector’s approval.
I would find it very upsetting if we were penalized differently, as in our case I am pretty sure it effected the outcome of the matches.
1 match at NJ on Friday, team 103, the cybersonics, had 2 tubes accidentally thrown over their flag by the human players on their side and they continued to place tubes without penalty.
To clarify, I believe that we **were ** assessed a penalty for having the tubes on the flag.
I know at KC that we had our a ringer on our flag during the first finals match. What seemed like a disater to us at first, turned out to be an excellent demonstration of teamwork as our alliance member, team 1775 grabbed the ringer off our flag and immediately scored it.
Gracious Professionalism at its best We could also not throw tubes and get rid of the chance of ringing the flags :rolleyes: Then again… that wouldn’t be a challenge… I take it back haha
we did the exact same thing in the finals matches at SVR. 852 got a ringer stuck on the top of their robot and we had one of our presets at the right the right to grab the tube and lift it off.
Not shown in the pictures is the zip tie we placed (at the start of VCU playoffs and during all of Chesapeake) from the bottom of the holder (seen left of the yellow elevator strap) that went down to the 80/20 below it to keep it vertical.
We had a problem of a different kind with our flag. At Chesapeake, our flag was knocked up enough for it to come out of the holder, but fell right back down and got stuck in our elevator system, locking it up and preventing us from scoring for the rest of the match. Temporary solution was to jam an ear plug into the flag holder along with the flag to keep it oriented away from the elevator. Any force big enough to knock the flag off afterwards was also big enough to knock it clear off the robot and fly off, instead of a small one that just plops it straight down.
However, the other problem we had was the actual holder itself coming off, swinging down because of the zip tie, and getting stuck in the elevator (again!). That one cost us our last qualification match, as we were on our way to a win only to not be able to complete the 6th ringer to out weigh the opposing alliance’s bonus points.
The flag holder placement was more of an afterthought right at the end of build season, which explains the problem’s we’ve had. Modifications are coming for Atlanta (hopefully :D)
They are kinda dangerous. At Boilermaker, I saw one get knocked out of a robot in a manner that it was ejected 10-15 into the crowd where it hit a man in the face. I’d like to see FIRST get stricter on this because many teams have them hidden or placed in a manner that they do not meet the guidelines in the manual.
They have been flying off of some robots, maybe they should change them to something closer to a piece of plexi or something that is attached via velcro to the top of the robot, something that is more likely to stay on the robot, even after getting rammed into a few times.
We could also not throw tubes and get rid of the chance of ringing the flags :rolleyes: Then again… that wouldn’t be a challenge… I take it back haha