In my personal opinion, getting UNDER a robot while playing defense is far less of an issue than getting ON TOP OF/INSIDE one, as long as you seek to reverse the situation immediately. The underside of a robot is pretty resilient, and the defending robot is assuming greater risk letting the defended bot get on top of them, where the more sensitive components are.
Bumpers and CG will shift; sometimes you’ll get under a bot - just reverse course IMMEDIATELY and do not exacerbate, and you’ll be fine.
Now if you end up getting on TOP of another while playing D, you should be opening yourself up to MUCH more scrutiny and immediate penalty, because now your drive wheels become weapons of death and dismemberment. Lead with your heavy end, defenders.
Any and ALL cases of frame incursion by an aggressor with a non-drivetrain appendage should be called IMMEDIATELY, as such appendages tend to rip wires, tubing, and do other various and sundry carnage in short order. Inspect your robots at match end, show the damage immediately, and camp in the question box until the referees get their act straight with regards to any such transgressors, whether they be malicious or ignorant.
Yes, actually it was. Arkansas 2014 was an interesting regional. Another team had a similar design, but with a prosthetic leg.
I don’t have any stills anywhere convenient, but here’s some lovely match video of Team 5259 Magic Smoke’s rookie robot: https://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2014arfa_qm2. Sadly, they folded after two seasons.
But to wander back in the direction of the thread topic, at this year’s Arkansas, 5002 Apophis showed up with a swerve drive that is also their climber as they extend all four modules like stilts. In creative material use, we also had a rookie using four door stops as the business end of their hatch panel manipulator.
No doubt a few alliances played some pretty tough defense in the MVR elims. 144 came at us so hard they broke off their cargo infeed arm. They also got up over our bumpers, damaging our air tank mounts. We’ll probably be taking a good look at their placement for Buckeye.
I will point out that in the finals, the head referee pulled our captain aside between matches to give a stern warning about 3792’s defense. He noted that there had been an instance where they got up over someone’s bumpers and that the next time that happened, if they didn’t immediately back off, he would penalize (yellow card? Can’t remember).
Everyone gets frustrated when their robot is the one getting beat on. I think some should have been called, but in the end I don’t want every match to have 20+ penalty points. The refs made a few bad calls I think, but they were mostly good. It’s just hard to not be mad when your robot is the one getting broke.
If a rule has not been formally reversed for all further play, I feel that it should be called every time. If we do anything else, what is the point of the rules?
We build our robots based on the rules. We play our robots based on the rules.
In reality, if a robot incurs 50 legitimate penalty points, then it is the fault of that team and no one else.
We did the same thing once doing our Dukes of Hazard climb at Humber. We just installed a new omni we brought with us, I don’t believe there is a replacement kit. Especially with the fracture happening on the main body of the wheel, I would be shocked if that was reparable.
1540 had an almost identical omni failure at Wilsonville last week (broke 3 rollers instead of 2 if memory serves.) We also just swapped the omni with a spare we had brought.
we have bought 4 total 6in and have 4 4in. I’m trying to convince my mentors to go from 2 separate drivetrains to 1 H-drive. Having no luck. Main reason 2nd drivetrain is there is they wanted the drivers to have the chance of crabbing to line up. Powered by a window motor, pretty slow, hooked up to 4 pneumatic cylinders. Broke this and left with 3 good omnis.
MWR was really interesting because it has been a week 6 event for years. I was so used to seeing all of the “top teams” at their peak performance, after having 6 weeks of iteration and a few comps under their belts. MWR was the first comp for every team attending, so there was a lot of ironing out details and working out bumps for the entire weekend. Also, alliance selections were a total surprise, I def thought 3695 would choose 2338 as their 1st pick, and then 16 would choose 111 as theirs. Elims were also very interesting - a rare occasion where neither the 1st or 2nd alliance faced off in finals.
Overall, an incredibly unique and sometimes shocking competition. I’m interested in seeing how teams evolve in the coming weeks.
We actually knew 3695 was not going to pick us. If you look at the data, 930 was running sub 12 cycles all day saturday. There was no beating the scores they could put up. We were close to that, but if every team there was ranked first, I’m pretty sure 930 would have been the first pick of every one, save maybe the ones without climbs.
My personal favorite match was ONTO3 (Humber) Quals 11. The defense played by 7723 allowed them to tie the match against 1114. It really opened our drive team’s eyes to how powerful defense could be.
No doubt about it, 930 was a fantastic choice. We were all shocked they were ranked so low, since they could fill up a rocket alone and even have time left over. We just weren’t super familiar with their team, since as far as I can tell this is their first year at MWR and so we hadn’t crossed paths with them before.
Hey I am from 5006 Apophis! Our Swerve stilts use Mini-Sims to lift each individual leg by itself, and we actually programmed the two at a time feature. (it’s faster)
