I was at a tournament this weekend, and I noticed that many of the teams were doing something I thought was interesting with the autoloader. I wanted to know if it was legal.
The teams were loading skyrise sections into the autoloaders, and attempting to pick them up with their robots. However, the skyrise pieces would often become skewed or slanted during these attempts, and thus difficult for the robots to pick up. The team would then have the robots back away, and would pick up the skyrise section (with their hands) and replace it upright in the autoloader.
According to (SG5)
“<SG5> There can only ever be one Skyrise Section in an Autoloader at any one given time. There will be one Skyrise Section in the Autoloader to start the Match. Additional Skyrise Sections will be loaded by a Student Drive Team Member into the Autoloader. Robots may not contact a Skyrise Section if it is being touched by a human. Minor violations of this rule that do not affect the match will result in a warning. Egregious (match affecting) offenses will result in a Disqualification. Teams that receive multiple warnings may also receive a Disqualification at the head referee’s discretion.”
This does say that robots can’t touch the pieces while humans are touching them. And the humans weren’t manipulating the skyrise sections while a robot was touching them. However, it does not specify whether or not a human can re-position a skyrise piece once it has been placed in the autoloader and a robot has already tried to pick it up.
I was wondering if this was legal or not. I could not find anything specific about this in the manual. If there has been a previous thread on the subject, I did not see it. Any knowledge about this would be much appreciated.