This is what happened when we lined up too squarely and drove too straight during autonomous testing.
I know 1746 did something very similar in practice recently. Does anyone know what the consequence of this is (field fault?)?
I don’t see it as field fault. Last year ramming the driver station and knocking off your opponents DS wasn’t. It coulc just as easily be a penalty for field damage. (Keep in mind I am not your referee.)
The problem with getting a field damage call here is that this is not easy to see the damage to the gear until well after the final match score is decided. Assuming the pilot can get the gear off the peg without attracting attention, the referees probably won’t even know about the damage until field reset. By the time the information would get to the head ref in order to call the post-match foul, the final match score would probably have been submitted already. Unless this would throw a very important match with a hard-on-fouls head ref and this being a repeated violation, I doubt they would want to take the time to go back and change the score.
I think the real question here is what happens if it is stuck on the peg and the HP can’t remove it. Is it a field fault for locking up a gear peg, or is it the team’s fault for damaging the gear? My vote is for field fault because the team used the gear and peg in the intended way, but failed in a way to prevent scoring. Similar to two balls getting stuck in a basket in 2012.
The difference here is that here there is a way to prevent this from being an issue. In 2012, there was nothing a team could do to prevent the basketballs from jamming; if the balls jammed, it wasn’t the team’s fault. Here, there are many options teams have to prevent this; not taking advantage of those options should not constitute a field fault. If you know your gear launcher is strong enough to puncture the gear, you can: turn it down, use a camera to line up so you don’t hit the gear with the peg, use a mating gear to turn the gear to not hit the peg, etc. IMO failure to do one of those should not result in a field fault. I would love if it results in a foul, but I think match timing logistics make that less than possible.
G24: A ROBOT may not LAUNCH a GEAR.
This could easily happen by driving into the peg in an attempt to line up the gear on it, without any other robot mechanism being involved. lining up properly is important, but lets be completely honest here… What percentage of teams are actually going to be able to guarantee they never hit the face of the gear with the peg?
Arguably so was that field fault in 2012. You could just increase the time between shots and that wouldn’t be an issue.
How I see it, this gear fault can be the result of any team driving into the peg with really unlucky placement. Teams are aiming to drive the gears into the peg as quickly as they can, so this is an expected outcome.
Now I would agree with a team fault if they were purposely trying to get the peg through the center of the gear, as that’s not how the gears were intended to be placed on the pegs.
That spring point “seems” a bit tall, so I am wondering, is it made to specs? If not, then I am curious to see what the actual point looks like. Thanks.
A ball also fits nicely on the gear lift spike. We also got one stuck on the hole in the teeth of the gear - admittedly we were trying to do it and weren’t using a robot when we did it.