The game manual says that during autonomous, reaching over the line such as to point does not count as crossing, and therefore no penalties(unless you’re controlling your robot, I’m assuming.) However, I’m wondering: if something were to go horribly wrong with autonomous, would it be legal to reach(or even step) over the line to press the emergency stop button? It would probably be considered controlling the robot, but I’m thinking there should be an exception for an emergency, especially when it concerns the safety of other people. What does everyone else think? Has anyone here actually done it?
I would say do it and forget about the penalties. In this game especially, these robots are built tough and I know ours would have little problem tearing the field apart if it went crazy.
Haha probably ours too, if the practice field is any indication…I think everyone(even the GDC!) underestimated how much damage both the field and the robots will take.
Actually, a more common reason to reach across the autonomous line is to catch your control board as it gets knocked off by robots smashing into the wall at high speed.
That’s usually allowed.
Here are the relevant rules:
Hitting an E-Stop is specifically called out as okay in G14, and I think it falls under the general “safety” clause in G15 as well. I think that the rules only call out safety just in case somehow there would be some strategic reason to hit an E-Stop in auto rather than a “I need my robot turned off now” reason.
In practice, when I’m reffing an event, if you hit your E-Stop in auto, I’m not likely to ask any questions about why, and I’m certainly not going to call any penalties for it. I don’t want any drive team to ever pause to think that they may be getting a penalty for it and hesitate when they need to be stopping their robot. If you ever think that you need to stop your robot for the match, hit the button already!
One side note: If you ever do use the E-Stop (in auto or not), after the match please turn the knob to pop the E-Stop back up. They can’t prestart the next match until all E-Stops are up (which makes sense when you think about it).