My team, TARDIS robotics, was wondering about the legality of some of the things we want to do.
if we or any other team holds the door open and let the other 2 robots in , Does the door need to close before letting a second robot in?
Is there a rule against having robot A hold the door to let robot B in and then Robot B holds the door on the other side to let Robot A in?
No and no
Both are legal and have been done
Yeah, no specific rules against them. However, it might be overkill to have to “chain-cross” the SP since it slows down the breaching of other defenses – it counts as a legal cross if you just travel back through the door from the courtyard, which any robot can do, and then spin in place, losing contact with the flap, before driving through again. Having one robot do this twice is typically faster than trying to coordinate a 3-bot chain and it frees up your alliance partners for scoring.
Having one robot open the door and 2 going through can be quite fast with good drivers. Use the least capable bot to open the door. You only have to do it once.
And if you can’t judge off that, pick by the slickest bumpers or smallest frame. There will probably be some rubbing unless you prop that sucker wide.
Since the door opens in the direction that blocks the outerworks referee’s view of the robot, it can be very difficult to tell whether the robot lost contact with the flap or not. It can sometimes even be difficult to tell whether the robot got entirely off the ramp from the defense! If the referee is not sure whether the robot did both of these things, then they’re not supposed to give credit for the cross. That makes this a risky strategy.
For the best chance of getting it counted, drive far enough past the door that half of your robot is visible to the referee. It also helps if you can get the door to visibly bounce off your robot, breaking contact more than once.
Or, just have a robot on your alliance that can open it from the neutral zone.
You have to get a feel for the ref staff at your regional/division. At the St Louis regional the refs seemed very hard-set on a very visible “swing away”, where at Wisconsin the refs seemed to give credit as long as you did a reasonably fast spin in the neutral zone. The second interpretation makes more sense to me since a rectangle robot would have to turn pretty slow to not at least momentarily break contact, but I can see it both ways.
At the two regionals I have attended and competed in (Finger Lakes and Pittsburgh) the ref(s) watching the defenses would give a very visible ok such as a head nod or thumbs up if contact was lost and the cross would count. On the contrary, if the cross would not count they would give a very visible no good.
We also noticed that as long as the robot was off the ramp and did a 180 or 360 degree spin the cross was always counted.