Yesterday, the Game Manual 1 for ROVER RUCKUS was released to the public. You can access it here.
Some things that stood out to me:
- The launching rules are here to stay. This suggests that we may have launching in this year’s game.
- The award judging second is redacted for now. I’m not entirely sure what this means - it could simply be that the judging criteria mention aspects of the game.
- The Control Award form is hidden, too. This could be to prevent teams from working on the submission early, but there could also be some relevant other things going on with the game.
- There is now a weight limit in FTC. It’s pretty high at 42 pounds, but it may make some of the more mind-blowing robot designs harder.
- COTS solutions (see: Greyt Intake Kit) seem to be pretty much explicitly banned via RM02. Perhaps we’ll see something similar for FRC, although the one-degree rule has been around for a while in FTC.
- There is now a bizarre new scoring element called the Team Marker in section 8.4. Will robots steal it? Will we have to put it on top of a peg, or in a special zone? Not sure yet. At the very least, we can decorate them in exciting ways, as per this blog post.
- T7 mentions that teams can’t use robots built by other teams. While cheesecake (as far as I’ve seen it) is a historically FRC thing, it’s unsure how it would be affected by this rule.
- What happened to Super-Regionals?
- As promised, the Legacy module is no longer supported.