IMO, the biggest lesson.
As opposed to the current spec, which is egregious or repeated violations of rules, either in strategy (doing something really outside the game, like disabling your opponent’s robot) or in safety or in civility?
Before yellow cards, that sort of thing was an instant DQ, no matter how minor.
The specific incident that seems to have sparked this at Chezy was called by the book. Team A disabled Team B to the point that Team B could not move. If that is not an appropriate penalty for a red card in playoffs (and I’ve heard messages that it isn’t appropriate in quals), then tell me: what is an appropriate penalty for that action, regardless of intent (because it’s difficult to tell intent for an outsider)? Would disabling the offending robot be appropriate? A yellow card?
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I unironically kind of like this, just add a tech foul or two and this seems like a more appropriate penalty than the red card.
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My one concern is that this assumes the scoring power is equivalent, which often is not the case. If a defender and an offender are disabled, the defender is still in an advantage, because they prevented the offender from scoring, which was their mission all along.
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Maybe disable the offender, add a new class of “Super Foul” equal to 4 or 5 regular fouls, and give the fouled robot credit for whatever the endgame in the game is. Plus a Yellow Card so that if there is a next time, it does become a DQ.
The “Super Foul” would be to compensate for whatever points the robot might score if it hadn’t been damaged. The endgame bonus would be to compensate for possibly missing a ranking point, or give points in the playoffs.
If a team is sitting on a YC, one would hope that peer pressure from the alliance partners would make them tone it down so as to not get another YC and thus a RC/DQ.
There could be room for improvement in the G204/G205/G206 continuum, but that’s another topic.
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Yeah, this. A red card is almost always detrimental to a team or alliance. Disabling one of the robots and taking away a few points could be a strategic decision, and one I’d suspect we see not infrequently.
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What I really like about disabling
one of the robots on the opposing alliance is that the penalty severity scales with time remaining in the match. I think a red card is approximately appropriate severity for disabling another robot by contacting them inside their frame perimeter, as long as that happens in the first 30 seconds of the match. However, I think a red card for this same action with 5 seconds left in the match is excessively harsh. There’s no way to properly weight punishment for these two cases with our current toolbox of penalties (fouls, tech fouls, yellow cards, red cards, automatic endgame points).
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One of the issues with the current Red Card for disabling a robot rule is that it doesn’t take into account at all how the other robot is built.
At some point (I’m not in anyway referring to the CC incident) there needs to be some responsibility put on teams to build robust robots. Our development team 8515 has drawn two red cards at off-seasons by being disabled, that robot was not built to the quality levels of our 3847 robot which has not been disabled when involved in similar or worse interactions. If I had my way neither of those red cards would have been called but by the rules they were correctly enforced.
All that being said, I am not sure how we write the correct rule but I don’t think we should be encouraging robots that stop moving when someone taps them inside their frame perimeter.
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I agree. But we also should definitely not allow for someone to intentionally knock someone out and get off with a slap on the frame.
And we have to balance that with as little “intent” in the rule as possible.
Maybe we take the foul/card balancing to another thread? There’s some good discussion to be had, that isn’t necessarily relevant to a DE merits discussion.
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I was thinking if its judged accidental it could be a yellow card and replay match. If its deemed somewhat intentional then red card and dq
I’ve seen a very similar thing occur with code as well. Recently there has been a rise in “irresponsible tippy robots”. The rise in brushless motors has massively increased acceleration, which for some robots leads to them “kicking up” when starting or stopping. I’ve seen multiple times where those robots go and play defense, then get tipped by the offender. A red card gets called in a case when it was lack of controls that was at fault.
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The problem is knowing if it’s intentional or not. Suppose a team is playing heavy defense and their intake pops out and it hits something inside the other robot. Was that intentional? or did the driver accidentally hit the button? There is also the problem that the refs need to call it with no way of looking back at it and if a ref happened to miss the moment of the incident they would be unable to judge if it was intentional or not.
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I know it would be difficult to ascertain if its intentional or not. We could always err on the side on incidental. Easier to decide if its tipping a robot over since the topic of tippy bots came up. We played in an off season event and were eliminated by getting a red for an extremely tippy bot getting tipped over. Thought it was really harsh because everyone could see that bot tipping back and forth all the time.
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We had multiple people approach us saying we were lucky the referees did not see us tip over 1902 or we would have been red carded. We have no idea what match they were watching but yeah I agree teams need to really think about the increase in motor strength as well as the difference between break and coast mode.
So here’s a question to throw a wrench in the works.
Picking on the CC incident: I guarantee you the disabling was not intentional. I would give the contact inside the frame perimeter the benefit of the doubt. I guarantee you that the bumper contact was 100% intentional by one or both robots (though they likely had different reasons for making it).
Which intent gets the call? The contact or the disable, which wouldn’t have happened without the contact?
1 Like
The GIF below is my sarcastic view of how I felt FIRST and the refs judged us allegedly disabling another robot. Both robots were driving towards each other and if anything we can make the argument the blue team was trying to stop/get in the way of us from lining up to score (reality is we were both going for the same spot).
Red cards for this kind of contact is punitive and resulted in the red robot dropping from what would have been then 4th or 5th seed captain to the mid-twenties in overall ranking. Also to pour salt on the wound, supposedly the team that got disabled made it all the way to champs where their inspector encouraged them to move their main power breaker higher on the robot and facing towards the outside of the robot so it was “more accessible” 
I mean disabling the “offending” robot is more fair than taking away ranking points or DQing an alliance in eliminations but in some cases you’re still at the mercy of another team’s quality of wiring. GDC just needs to figure this out either with yellow cards, warnings, or something that doesn’t ruin a team’s event that is playing (offense specifically) within the spirit of the rules.
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Would be interesting to compare tipping frequency to each robot’s tipping angle (angle at which robot center of mass is directly over the bumper edge. I bet the robots with the lowest 10% of tip angles are responsible for at least 50% of the tips we see in matches. Assuming that is true, a relatively simple “tip test” could be part of inspection to ensure there are no robots excessively prone to tipping.
Obviously this won’t cover all cases, and robots can change configurations to change their tip angle. If a robot is already super tippy in its starting configuration though, it’s pretty unfair for other teams to risk red cards against them because of another team’s unstable design.
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My 2c worth is:
- robots should be designed and built robustly enough to survive incidental contact,
- red cards should be for egregious acts (purposeful or wildly reckless), where you in fact think, “they should be out of the competition for that”, because that is almost always the result,
- whatever the standard, it should be called consistently
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My two cents reading through all this:
- Tippy robots are bad. However, even a robot with a relatively low, centered CG can pick up one end when accelerating, with the motor power we’re seeing put towards drive trains these days. It doesn’t have to pick up enough to tip, just enough to get over someone’s bumpers to cause problems.
- We really need games that limit the need to extend outside the frame perimeter. Give us specific zones for intaking, and you should eliminate most of the contact penalties - and exempt it in those zones (defenders beware!) and you’ll eliminate the rest.
- I’ve seen refs call to disable a robot in the past (mostly due to detached bumpers). It can take surprisingly long for it to happen - ref communicates to head ref, who communicates to the scoring table, who then finds the team on their screen, asks for confirmation, which eventually comes back from the original ref. All of that takes time. I think relying on the ability to quickly disable an opposing robot as a penalty leads to the potential for the penalty to have a different impact in different matches depending on how fast it happens, and giving one alliance 1/4-1/2 of a match in a 3v2 situation may be an insurmountable advantage, and I really don’t like the thought of the discussions that would happen with the head ref when a team thinks the opponent wasn’t disabled fast enough.
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I agree that something needs to change. The 2 problems I witnessed was consistency and accuracy.
Consistency: There were many more red and yellow cards at SFR compared to SVR. The lead referees just had a different philosophy on contact within the frame perimeter. It would very difficult for FRC to train these volunteers to have a consistent card policy.
Accuracy: Robots are just moving too fast in most cases to figure out if the frame perimeter intrusion caused the damage or disabling. We had a match where we were given a yellow card when another team’s polycarb protector came off. On video it is clear that the polycarb came off because of the collision and not from our intake hitting it. This would be a very difficult thing to see in real time.
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