Is it legal to have more than one shooting mechanism (ie. one on the front and another on the back of your robot)? I looked throgh the rules and couldn’t find anything against it, but I may not have seen it.
There should not be a problem with having multiple “shooting” mechanisms as no rules specifically limit the number of functional components on the robot.
Nothing in the rules prohibits this.
I thought you could only have possession of 1 soccer ball at a time:confused:
I would think that it would be helpful so you could get a ball without having to turn the robot around, it would increase the speed at which you could play the game.
not to try to play with two balls at once!
The only issue with the rules would be if you did it to shoot faster than once every 2 seconds
But only if it triggers the conditions of G30 (a):
ROBOT Volume – During a MATCH, no part of the ROBOT shall extend outside the vertical projection of the FRAME PERIMETER, except as follows:
a. BALL Interaction Volume – Solely for the purposes of interacting with a BALL, MECHANISMS that are below the BUMPER ZONE may extend up to the BUMPER PERIMETER, for a period not exceeding two seconds. After returning inside the FRAMER PERIMETER, such MECHANISMS are not permitted to re-extend beyond the FRAME PERIMETER for at least two seconds.
<G43> ROBOT BALL POSSESSION - ROBOTS may POSSESS only one BALL at a time. Violation: PENALTY
So to answer your thought or question yes robots may only possess 1 ball at a time but that was not the question. karatekid was wondering if it was legal to have multiple shooters dosn’t mean 2 balls will be in possession at the time. Probably for strategic purpose’s.
According to G30 does this mean that each mechanism can only shoot every 2 seconds, or that once one mechanism breaks the frame perimeter that no other mechanisms can do so for 2 seconds?
Your good to go with this, but while I’m here I thought I would suggest something 1930 did in 2008. Are main idea was that you could save time by not turning and instead backing up when you got to the other end of the field, to aid in this we set up two buttons on top of the joysticks that would reverse the forward direction on the joystick to instead move the robot backwards. This means that if you have a ball behind you during the game you can just press a button and it will reverse the robots direction, to some this may seem trivial, but it helps you make better sense of the direction your going in and is more comfortable than just going backwards.
yes, at least to my interpretation
If one of these mechanisms acted on multiple balls would it be considered possessing them? I am unclear if kicking i considered possession. The intent of the rule seems to be to stop teams from hoarding balls not stop them from kicking many of them. Any thoughts?
It is legal, to the best of my knowledge, to kick multiple balls. Although it would be very impractical to do so because you end up sacrificing your accuracy, also I believe this question was asked, by karatekid, is whether it is allowed to have multiple mechanisms to have a shooting, or kicking mechanism, in more than one place. The answer to that has been decided yes it is allowed but you may not possess two or more balls at a time.
I don’t think that was a yes or no question…
The definition of possession in the rules is that if when your robot moves, the ball is in the approximately same place *relative *to the robot. So one mechanism acting on multiple balls is legal.
What someone on my team mentioned that if you were to have multiple mechanisms to “kick” the ball but they did not pass the bumper perimeter, then in fact you can kick balls as many times as you want because you would never need to wait the reload time of 2 seconds cause your kicker would never break the bumper perimeter
This is correct. your robot can interact with balls inside the frame perimeter as much/often as you want, as long as you also follow the 3" incursion rule.
I read this
a. BALL Interaction Volume – Solely for the purposes of interacting with a BALL, MECHANISMS that are below the BUMPER ZONE may extend up to the BUMPER PERIMETER, for a period not exceeding two seconds. After returning inside the FRAMER PERIMETER, such MECHANISMS are not permitted to re-extend beyond the FRAME PERIMETER for at least two seconds.
and interpret it to individually apply to each mechanism, as long as they are independent of each other. Good question for Q&A though.