Dear Karthik,
Here it is, another question about touching your bot! 
My team has implemented a hinge mechanism to keep objects from rolling away from us on the field: Hinge mechanism | This mechanism keeps balls from rolling aw… | Flickr
I am wondering if this situation would be considered legal:
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During programming skills, we have our bot drive onto the Iso starting tile to collect the doubler barrel in our hinge-mechanism.
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We then drive back to our starting tile, bringing the doubler with us.
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The force of driving backward brings the barrel into the front of the hinge, thus touching the barrel into the hinge on a few points of contact on each side. (Similar to the picture shown, but with a doubler barrel. My apologies for not having a pic with a barrel)
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Again, to be clear, when our bot stops on our original interaction starting tile, the barrel is touching the hinge-mechanism from the back side.
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We would then adjust our bot to position the barrel into the proper spot for our intake, before our autonomous sending to the next step (by use of bumper switch). This adjustment would entail simply sliding our chassis forward a few inches, until the barrel hits a stop, which means it is aligned for in-taking.
I am wondering if this act would be considered legal. The only thing that has me questioning it is that I am unsure of the legality of touching/moving our bot while a barrel is in contact with our chassis.
According to <SG5> of the Gateway manual: During contact with the Robot, the Drivers or Coaches may not intentionally manipulate or modify the position of any Scoring Objects, either by direct hand contact or indirect contact via the Robot.
I do not view this shifting of our chassis as modifying the position of the scoring object, but rather repositioning the rest of our bot AROUND the object. The barrel’s position would not be modified, but the rest of the bot would simply be slid so that the bot itself was in the proper position to intake, while not moving the barrel itself.
I hope that this makes sense. If you would like me to take a video or make a drawing of what I’m talking about, I would be more than happy to do so.
If this act is deemed illegal, I have a follow-up question:
Instead of moving the bot by hand after it has brought the doubler back to our starting Interaction Tile, would it be legal to program a bumper switch that would allow us to “drive” the chassis forward?
If we made a bumper switch that would drive our chassis forward when pressed, and stop when let go, would this be legal?
This would eliminate the direct human-manipulation issue that is talked about in <SG5>, but would still require our bot to move while in contact with a doubler barrel.
This would allow us to align the barrel properly for our intake, but would not require us to move our chassis by hand.
We have a competition coming up next weekend, so if I could please have a quick ruling on this, I would be very appreciative.
Thank you very much for your time!
The Members of 1200E New Divide
