2022 Carver Division - Competition / Championship Event - Chief Delphi
I haven’t been around long enough to know if wire cutting / tampering (see below in the thread from others as well) like this a common occurrence at champs or not. Is it necessary for teams to take measures against this or was it likely just a one-off kind of thing? Is it something to be concerned about? I would hope it was just something that happened once and not something to worry about.
This is a good reminder to teams to perform full system checks at the start of each day and before/after each match. It sucks things like that potentially happen but these checks can save you from the issues caused affecting a match.
It’s neither common nor unheard of, unfortunately. Every few years a story comes out about sabotaged robots in the pits. It’s disappointing and disgraceful but as Nik said, you should always run a full check first thing every morning just in case.
If you’re worried about it happening to you, push your robot cart all the way back into the pit at night, and put a bag or tarp over it. Most of the time I hear about something like this it’s opportunistic rather than targeted. That means that putting even a minor barrier in the way will keep you safe.
If something like this does happen to you, it’s not unrecoverable. Make sure you have solder, a soldering iron, heat shrink, and a heat gun in your pit. Also, 1678 is always willing to help out anyone who needs it. If something happens to your bot, feel free to stop by the Citrus Service cart.
I remember last year at Worlds, I was talking to a team that had cut wires all over their robot, and to be honest I believed that another team did it and they did to, so it wouldn’t be the first time but I would keep an eye out for other people tampering with your robot. Just to be safe.
It’s also not a bad idea to just always have at least one person designated to stay at the pit. They’ll also be able to answer questions from interested teams about your robot and alert other team members if judges come by. Just make sure you change who that is throughout the day so that everyone has a chance to go eat, etc.
My team generally uses the safety captain for this purpose although we generally don’t pursue the safety awards so if you do another solution would be good. One benefit of using Safety Captain is that you now have a badge you ca use to indicate who is staying in the pit and can pass it off when the captain has to run out for a minute.
After being in Carver last year I can neither confirm nor deny that the cover that goes over our robot when we leave the pit for the day was designed to make it more challenging for sabotage.
I can also neither confirm nor deny the existence of a motion sensitive camera hidden in our pit setup pointed at our robot.
I will say I am sad that I can’t trust my robot to be left alone at Champs.
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