As the FIRST Robotics Competition community prepares for the upcoming season, one rule in particular could benefit from further review: the “momentary rule.” While designed to support fast-paced gameplay, this rule has led to some unintended consistencies and could be refined for clarity and fairness.
The momentary rule (for those new to first) allows teams to briefly hold or interact with more game pieces than allowed without penalty, as long as the interaction is temporary. In theory, this rule provides flexibility and helps teams avoid penalties for incidental interactions. However, in practice, we are seeing two main issues emerge.
First, there is inconsistent enforcement across regional and district events. Teams in different regions are experiencing different applications of the rule, with some events allowing a more liberal interpretation of “momentary” and others enforcing stricter limits. This inconsistency becomes problematic as teams advance to the World Championships, where they face new interpretations of the rule they may not have encountered before. A consistent standard across events is crucial to ensure a fair and balanced experience for all teams.
Second, while teams are abiding by the rule as written, we’re seeing cases where the flexibility of “momentary” handling is used as a strategy to handle multiple game pieces for a brief period. While technically within the rules, this approach creates a gameplay dynamic where some teams are able to briefly increase their effectiveness without penalty—something the rule may not have originally intended.
I recognize that the 2025 game may not include the momentary rule, but if it does, a more clearly defined version (IMO) would benefit teams across the board. Establishing stricter guidelines, whether by narrowing the allowed time for incidental contact, limiting the rule to specific scenarios, or removing the flexibility altogether, would help create a uniform and fair standard across all competitions.
This is a very good topic to discuss, but I think it’s important to note that the game manual has repeatedly defined ‘momentary’ as ‘approximately 3 seconds’. It became a topic of conversation in 2022, including deciding the world championship, and, yet, FIRST decided to keep the same clear definition. IMO, FIRST is clear how they want it to be called and some regions/events do not follow the rules.
If you talk to the refs beforehand (I think 118 did this) you can get them to apply it more so by the book. But it’s ultimately up to the refs to enforce it correctly. Maybe dedicate a section of ref training for this? (If such training exists, I’m not a volunteer)
One solution would be to change the definition of Momentary to 1 seconds instead of 3 seconds. The advantage of this would be to limit top teams attempting to take advantage of holding 2 notes/cargo for 2.5 seconds at the cost penalizing teams for accidentally picking up 2 notes/cargo and not ejecting the second one within 1 second.
I support this. FIRST also, as mentioned previously, has been very inconsistent in (edit: bc i don’t know if its clear) certain rules across the events. There needs to be a more clearcut rules clarification and competitions, what you can and can’t do by refs. Something I personally think is better if its written in as a parenthetical to clarify what they mean, even if its in the rules manual somewhere else, it’s worth to add a note about it next to violation anyway. I don’t know how they would enforce it across regionals/districts events. Perhaps would have to be more clear-cut and quantified in the manual for that?
Perhaps we could also take the FTC approach where you also get penalized if you score while overpossessing, which significantly hinders the intentional abuse of the rule while not penalizing people for accidentally overpossessing apart from the wasted time of removing the extra gamepiece.
I’m actually surprised by this. During one of our offseason events, every time in auto we accidentally touched another game piece in auto, we automatically got called for a foul. It was never close to 3 seconds but it did move about 3 ft or so.
I’m not a fan of reducing the time for MOMENTARY control. I’m thinking about lower resource/experienced teams who may inadvertently intake 2 game pieces but not have the sensors, or even line of sight, to see it and react to clear them of a potential FOUL within 1 second.
I am in favor of refining that blue box to include cases of repeated and/or strategic MOMENTARY CONTROL.
In other words - don’t penalize for simple mistakes, quickly corrected with no harm/foul or material change in the game play - do penalize for teams that may “abuse” this leeway for strategic benefit.
I think this is a big red herring. Within the past three seasons, we have twice seen elite-level gameplay become completely counter to what a majority of non-litigious teams or intelligent but naive newcomers would assume is the obvious meaning (or at least intent) of the rules. I’m not claiming that the GDC is unaware of this fact and that it has only happened because of an oversight, but this state of affairs is bad on its own merits.
Should we be so worried about the occasional occurrence of fouls by low- to middle-resource teams who make mistakes during matches? As soon as the current iteration of the MOMENTARY exception was understood for what it is in 2022, this particular line of argumentation popped up. But was there an epidemic of too-many-game-piece fouls in previous years? That’s an answer in search of a problem. The matter of fact is that by far the largest impact of the MOMENTARY exception has been to give elite teams who could program and drive their robots to consistently exploit it without incurring fouls a substantial new leg up on the upper-middle-resource teams and everyone below them. Arguing that the reverse is true is obfuscation or willful denialism. It should be scrapped wholesale.
If there, for some reason, exists a compelling desire on the part of the GDC to intentionally allow multiple game piece control for a brief window, the rules should actively be written from that perspective. For example:
This construction would make it clear to all teams that briefly controlling multiple game pieces is part of the intended gameplay, not an edge case. It also avoids using the word MOMENTARY, which, although defined in the glossary, inevitably leads to readers’ (including referees’) injecting their subjective understanding of the lay-definition of the word.
I like the FTC approach. Would need to word it such that something like grabbing many game pieces and shuttling them w/o shooting didn’t inadvertently become legal (unless that was specifically desired).
I agree with the impact of this rule, but I think it’s a good thing in the context of providing a competition framework that serves to, well, inspire and recognize science and technology.
Making a set of rules where the very best young engineers can’t really differentiate their team’s on-field performance might serve to keep scores closer and the outcome of matches more random, but I think that’s much less inspiring.
I think of FRC as being more like Formula 1 than NASCAR; it’s not a spec-series, the machines are vastly different from team to team, and engineering innovations can give teams a significant advantage. (And I say this as a team that’s way more Sauber than Red Bull, McLaren, or Ferrari.)
There’s no risk of this. FRC is never going to become anything close to a spec series by the nature of its purpose and its format. The space of competitive advantages a sufficiently knowledgeable and dedicated team can pursue is almost endless.
But writing rules that make the average team go “I thought they couldn’t do that…?” when they see another team taking advantage is the opposite of inspiring.
The ultimate foundation I’m falling back on is that the rules should be clear—I believe that the current MOMENTARY exception fails on this basis because it is written in a way that sounds innocuous and inconsequential unless you know how it actually gets interpreted at events. Very few teams without this pre-existing knowledge would design their robot around such an ability. This is the wrong kind of barrier to put up—the rules should allow elite teams to produce elite robots, but they should not, to the greatest extent possible, reinforce inequality between teams by containing misleading or obscured restrictions that only some teams realize they can bypass.
It might be a quirk of my own brain (but I don’t think I’m alone in this). I do take inspiration when someone else applies diligent thought and creatively capitalizes on something that I was impossible (either by physics or game rules).
“I thought they couldn’t do that…? I guess I’ll have to think harder next time.”
