The situation is where loaded cubes would immediately fall off of a robot and land completely outside the alliance starting tile.
Teams have devised strategies based on this being legal. It’s VERY common to have the cube roll off of the robot, either on purpose or by accident, and a lot of times the cubes aren’t touching the alliance starting tile when they land.
This is a very large change to the rules interpretation, and comes very late in the season. It will bring a few challenges for all the events that are being held this weekend (that are aware of the change).
Q: @Adam T In other words, if a cube is loaded and the team member hasn’t imparted energy on the cube, and the cube touches the robot then ends up immediately off the robot and outside of the alliance starting tile, is this legal?
A:
This response has been edited on January 12th. The new response is below:
No this is not legal. Please see the below linked question for more details.
Good point. Why not make a post in the Q&A asking for clarification? It looks like the assumption in the answer is that the only way something like that could happen is if energy is imparted - but there are definitely scenarios where you could gently place a cube on a robot and gravity would take over.
So they were building a 6’ ramp just for rolling the cube over the fence? That is what your linked Q&A references, or the type of robot I got out of it.
I actually intended to post this whole thread in the Event Partner forum to make them aware of the Q&A answer update, and to solicit comments and advice. I had two “New Comment” windows open and inadvertently posted this here.
I was just trying to imagine it, because we had problems with judges and dropping the cube into our claw. One time we were yelled at for the robot not being mostly inside the starting tile, then they yelled at us for our claw being outside of the field perimeter. We finally came to an agreement at a driver meeting that as long as we were touching the tile, we could drop it onto our claw.
Oh, I see the change. Looks like it was most definitely a conscious effort. Teams and referees definitely need to know about this - especially if they were counting on using the strategy!
I don’t want to go into too much detail of what this team did because #1 it’s their idea to share and not mine. And #2 it is surrounded by a lot of questions and not necessarily something to emulate.
Yeah, after think about it more, I think I understand the strategy they were trying. The first thing I imagined was a ramp because our refs are usually pretty strict on literally dropping the cube vertically, no lateral motion at all until it touches the robot.
