I’m with you there. Not sure if there’s any plausible rule changes they could make to that end though. Removing the “damaging contact” rule would battlebot-ize the competition. Hardening it would make for even more absurd rulings (or, as someone else suggested, would result in teams ‘armoring’ themselves with flimsy breakable things).
It’s too bad SF1-3 had to be known for the calls afterwards. It (and the other 2 matches in that series) were amazing to watch.
Update G24 or add an over-arching clause to the rules that prevents teams from being penalized for getting damaged (if they want to be really pedantic, they could make it “inconsequential or non-advantageous” damage).
Does anyone expect the Waterloo SF 1-3 situation to happen again? (I don’t, maybe once)
It was a very specific situation that led to the ruling favouring blue. It is equally likely that a similar collision could go the other way if the defensive robot broke completely.
I’m not defending the GDC’s decision, but I suspect they are taking “what are the chances it will happen” approach given the complexity of the robot interaction rules. (see 2012 build season cantilevered bridge grappling definition)
While I don’t think this exact call will pop up more than once or twice again this season, I think there a good chance that a call this controversial will decide at least one division final and an Einstein match too. The fouls are just too big and unevenly enforced to keep huge controversies from boiling up over and over and over…
If the damage was in fact caused by contact with the ball, then there should be no foul on blue based on this Q&A:
Q. G28 -If a ROBOT is in possession of a ball, and the method of possession places the ball outside the bumper perimeter, but above the bumpers, and said ball contacts an opposing ROBOT (inside its frame perimeter), is that considered contact inside the frame perimeter? (and thus a potential penalty)
2014-01-15 by FRC4509
A. G28 refers to contact by the ROBOT, not the BALL.
It depends on what “it” is really. If you mean damage causing robots to break the size constraints, it happens multiple times a year - a penalty for not completely breaking. I would have to check again to find instances of this being possibly caused by opponent contact, but I bet I could find one. Personally, I think the fact that you broke your robot is punishment enough, and having this weird edge case where you get a big penalty if your robot partially breaks in a specific way but not in other cases makes zero sense. Robots that are clearly violating the rule solely because they are broken shouldn’t be penalized under the rules, though that is how they are written as of now.
But even then, you could even have controversy: 1114’s damage wasn’t entirely inconsequential: as I understand it, the uprights were/are required to support their claw pre-match. In a 3-match series where that collision happened in the first one, 1114 could easily argue the damage required them to burn a timeout to fix it, and so a non-call on what they’d perceive as real damage would still be deciding the match in one way or another.
If it comes down to a judgement call, there’d still be people upset about the result.
Not to be “that guy,” but wasn’t this being discussed elsewhere? Is this now becoming a game of “where can we discuss what should have been called?”
I went to Waterloo, there were some really high-quality matches among some of the best teams in FIRST. It is rather unfortunate that the referee calls are what people are remembering in what was an otherwise excellent showdown. Both alliances were well thought out, and I hate to have seen it work out the way it did because of a set of poorly worded rules that are constantly changing.
Which brings me to my main point: Yes. There are a large number of people who don’t like the rules and people who are upset about how poor calls have affected their performance. I have no right to tell you that you cannot be upset because I know I would be too. Week after week, we have complained about the rules and asked for updates only to get angrier about whatever rule changes were released. This week, it seems as if the game is staying the same. At what point would you rather have a consistent set of mediocre rules rather than a set of rules that is difficult to stay up to date with and drastically changes the game each time. It’s Week 5 already. The GDC changes the game after people respond, and then people get angry at the changes (Again, not saying they were good changes or that the rules are perfect). In this case, the GDC has done nothing and people are angry.
Otherwise, the update is pretty exciting.
Garrick
This situation has absolutely happened before and will happen again. At the NC regional a robot’s battery fell out of their robot after a collision and was dragging behind them much greater than 20 inches (the wires were excessively long). They decided to stop driving but NO penalties were assessed to either team.
Basically we have an odd but certainly possible situation (pieces breaking on a robot but not falling off) that is sometimes penalized. It is sort of up to refs discretion unfortunately.
It’s being discussed here because the update was expected by many to address this component of the rules, and it didn’t. Discussing potential rules updates in the context of a thread about rules updates makes sense to me.
In Dallas, one of the robots was dragging an air tank around for part of the match. Did it extend more than 20 inches past the frame perimeter? Maybe.
I feel like batteries and air tanks not being secured and/or dragging behind the robot should be an auto-disable due to safety reasons.
Mr Lim,
I feel as if both our scenario and 1114’s scenario were called properly by refs doing their job correctly. I was not at Waterloo, so I cannot speak for that event, but at Lenape the refs tried to call the game strictly by the rulebook and that is where I believe the problem lies.
At Lenape, Q3-1, one of our alliance partners backed into a team who’s intake were two pieces of 1/4" aluminum round stock that at the time of impact was hanging about halfway out of their frame perimeter. The stock bent ever so slightly, and it was called as damage in the frame perimeter - 50pt not 20pt. In fact, at Lenape, G27 was always a 50pt tech foul and never 20, or called as both 50 AND 20 resulting in 70pts of fouls. The team at the end of the match simply bent it back and marched of the field with a win. Q3-2, we were instructed by our alliance captain not to play defense and to avoid contact as much as possible. Meanwhile, whoever had the ball on our alliance would get dog piled by 2/3rds of the other alliance with little to no fear of a tech foul. We felt punished because our entire alliance engineered our robots too well. To add some irony, we later won the quality award - our first ever award at an event other then District Champions. To say the least, no one involved with the team were much too happy about it.
In my opinion, the rulebook is broken. Very broken. Broken to the point where if refs try to call games strictly by the book, it is near impossible to have consistent calls. Penalty values are out of whack. Many matches there were blatantly obvious g27 fouls that were not called simply because the refs were not watching that specific robot at that specific time. I don’t blame them - they have much more on their plate then they should have. To sum up Lenape - It was raining tech fouls from the heavens, and it was frustratingly inconstant. We got the short end of the stick, and according to Ether’s twitter data, we’re currently the unluckiest team in MAR and it’s costing us a potential slot at MAR CMP.
Therefore, I lay my blame not in the reffing staff or the head ref or the volunteers of the event, but on FIRST and the GDC themselves for being out of touch and forcing their picture of the game on us at all costs. They need to fix the rules and let it play out, and admit their mistakes so the season can move on.
My frustration comes from my driver returning from the question box telling me that the head ref said (paraphrasing my driver here) ‘he is very sorry he had to make that call, and he knows he shouldn’t have to, and that this rule is the reason he did not look forward to reffing this game as any team can simply loosen a wire, get hit and lose comms and gain 50-70 points’.
If the head ref knows it is wrong, and I have parents complaining to me that its wrong and I have to tell them we can’t do anything about it, my students end up as distressed as they did as a result, and I have students from a team on the OTHER alliance apologizing for winning ‘such a troll game’, there is something wrong. We know how to lose, we’ve done it for years. This wasn’t a loss. It was downright unfair. I’m sure other teams feel the same way.
This was also us (FRC418) at Arkansas. In SF3-1, we got slammed by another robot, and that dislodged our cleco attachments we were using to hold on our bumper (our bumper is a uni-bumper that wraps around the robot). Our bumper slammed into systems internal to the robot, and broke zip ties mounting the air tanks and dislodged a couple air hoses (they were still connected, but not “out of harm’s way”). We replaced the bumper clecos, and looked for damage but nothing looked suspect (we didn’t see the broken zip ties), but the air system held air just fine and everything looked good. We went back out for SF3-2 and during autonomous when our drivetrain started moving an air hose got caught by the drivetrain and ripped the hose and air tank off our robot. The end result was us dragging an air tank behind our robot by its air hose. After a few seconds of dragging the air tank around, the FTA disabled our robot from the Scorekeeper Station. We were not 20" outside our bumper zone, but it wasn’t what I would call “safe” either.
-Danny