Will sitting on top of tubes at the end of the match be allowed for points if the tube holds you 4 inches off the ground or are the tubes considered part of the field
I’d check with FIRST on this question.
The rule says you can’t be in contact with any part of the field, and last year the balls were considered part of the field, so I would assume the tubes would also be.
Well last year if we were partially on the ramp, but held up off the floor by a ball, we were still considered on the ramp and given the points.
I laughed out loud. Last night, my son RobotAddict came up with this idea, too. I really enjoy the creativity of the FIRST crowd.
Has anyone else noticed that this might be the Year of the Hovercraft? (In deference to you very serious utes in the audience, this is a joke. Yes, I know that scoring will be done with the power off and that a hovercraft would be touching the arena floor before scoring is complete.)
We actually tried setting a 120-pound robot on top of a pool ring this afternoon to see how well it worked.
Mostly, it didn’t.
The pool ring seemed dangerously close to bursting, so we didn’t put the entire weight down. The robot was very unstable, and would likely have fallen over had we let go of it.
This is definitely a question for the Game Design Committe, but even if “field element” doesn’t include “game piece”, I think it would be extremely hard to make the idea work reliably.
If you could distribute the robot’s weight over multiple tubes, i.e. if a light robot were to rest itself on top of multiple tubes using a flat piece of material, they might hold the weight.
Then you’d have to ask whether that’s possession of multiple tubes - are you controlling the movement of the tubes, or just using them passively after positioning them one at a time?
I don’t think FIRST would be very happy with your team if you are constantly wrecking all of thier tubes. They aren’t free.
At the Kickoff in Manchester someone suggested that it might be easier to deflate a tube before you tried to score it, this statement was overheard by one of the GDC members, they very pointedly made the statement that any intentional deflating of a tube would result in a DQ.
Now I know that this is my opinion, but I would think that putting a 100+ lb robot on top of one these tubes, and having the tube pop, would be considered intentional.
How would the robot get on the tube to begin with?
Yeah I thought of that (and mentioned it in another thread).
However, a hovercraft would probably get knocked around too easily, so it should probably have wheels it uses until the end of the match.
I think it would be awesome to make a hovercraft. I’m sure if you showed it off at an outreach event everyone would be impressed.
I guess that means no spikebot :rolleyes:
When we inflated our tube, we wanted to distribute the weight over the tube, so we put a drafting board on top of it. We didn’t have a robot on hand, but we stacked the entire KOP on the board, and it sank to about 6.5" , which is interesting. Has anyone else noticed that they are really only about 7.5" high, not 9.5 like the rulebook claims? So it sank about an inch, although I can’t give you a number for how much weight we used. Tomorrow when the weightroom is open we’re gonna go try it out with exactly 135 lbs (have to add in bumpers).
The rules state that intentional damage to the tubes call for disqualification, as they are field elements. Therefore, sitting on a tube will not give you any bonus. That said, if some team manages to make a robot that can sit on a tube without popping it or permanantly damaging it, I will be very impressed.
if you notice that in the video you had Dean on a tube and it will hold his weight he is at least 140 lbs. these tubes can hold 120 lb robot without a problem.
The question is, is the tube a element of the field. I do not think so.
If you can do this. it will be easy to sit on two tubes. you hold one and sit on the other at the end of the game
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Doesn’t sitting on two tubes count towards multiple possession of tubes, which is not allowed?
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I think it would not count because it is laying on a game piece.
Pavan.
I thought about the same thing and I put a 40 pound table flat on the tube and then kneeled on it and it did not pop-I weigh 240lbs. Seems silly but it actually worked.
Ok, ya, its all about pressure, not weight, so as long as you distribute it evenly you should be just fine with even more weight.
Personally, I think game pieces are considered “field elements” and teams will penalized for resting on them.
That said, I do think they should bend the rules a bit and allow creative teams the opportunity to stack a robot on top of the tubes. Though they should assign a penalty if the robot happens to pop them. Making it a fairly risky endeavor, but it would encourage some creativity from teams. Though you’ve got to consider, the only reason you’d want to do this is so that two robots can climb on top of another robot, and you’d want to support that one robot off the ground. So we’re not really talking about whether an inner tube can supporting 120ish pounds of one robot, we’re really talking about supporting 360 pounds of 3 robots!
Yeah, I don’t think it’ll happen. Of course there’s also every individual robot climbing onto an inner tube, which would also be an option, though once you get to this pointt would be much easier for teams to just design a decent ramp 
Don’t forget the battery
The “climbing on a tube” angle seems to be lawering the rule a bit. The spirit of the rule is clearly to get robots that can stack on top of one-another. I suspect that a revision/clarification to the rules will reflect this.
That said, there was a lot of discussion today about doing that. It would be an interesting mechanism that would allow a robot to climb on a tube without flipping it, popping it, or falling off. Those things are tricky for people to get in (in a pool)…