ok, so. I’m not upset about how calls have been made on this but I’m curious to know how other situations like this have been handled. My robot at the previous competition scored autonomously every match. However in one match another team had a program which ran their bot forward and proceded to aim it at mine. Even though it failed to prevent me from scoring we asked the judges if that was considered pinning or anything of the sort. They ruled that it was not and that is a fair argument considering I cant think of anything off of the top of my head in the manual that deals with the situation. However, i found the logic in his explanation flawed. He said that it is not intentional ramming because there is no way for the other team to know i would be in that spot. I found this flawed because i saw the other team watchin me practice with it, and i had done the same thing in the prior three matches. Now given this information and a little common sense i would say that with 99% certainty that the robot in question would do the same again. So with my common sense logic i say they “knew” i would be there.
After my long story has anyone else had this disscussion with an official and came back with another explanation?
I’m not totally against the strategy given that it is never to my knowledge been called against the rules but i dont see how especially in this situation that their using a ramming program could not be called intentional.
I find that the game designers are really smart about their intentions. The fact that they do not ban defensive auto strategies means, to me, that they know they are going to happen and think they are part of the game. Now it’s time to start working out auto strategies that are effective even when someone is defending you. I remember an FTC team last year (when it was still Vex) that had several auto modes that included “wait” modes of different lengths. In one great match they had against a team that had a “drive forward for 10 seconds and then spin” defensive auto, they sat stationary for a few (5-6?) seconds while the defensive 'bot sailed past, and *then *they ran their routine and scored. It was very cool.
You are now in the next stage of auto – how to make it work when others are trying to prevent it. Look at it this way: you are now good enough that others are willing to abandon their own scoring efforts just to stop you. This just means you now get to go the next level, leaving other teams even farther behind. Good luck!
happens all the time. I personally always make sure an alliance member with no auto can disrupt an opponent.
Our alliance captain in the world championships in 06’ had an amazing disrupt auto, where they managed to keep 1114 from scoring 5 balls in auton starting from the other side of the arena. It’s a very useful strategy.
For autonomous pinning, think of this situation: One robot has programming good enough to take 5 cubes out of the autoloader and score in 4 different goals netting them upwards of 24 points. Your robot plays defense in autonomous to prevent that and rams them against a wall. You are promptly disqualified for pinning.
Fair? No.
I programmed an autonomous mode that attempted to ram both robots about an hour before our last competition. We also had autonomous modes that scored and we used them for every single match, except in our second match in the finals, where we, out of nowhere, rammed a robot about to score. It’s not about how much you do it, it’s about when.
Last year when we switched from FIRST to IFI we only had a few weeks to build a second bot. We won, but our autonomous consisted of us driving forward, we messed up almost everyones autonomous.
I think my favorite mess-up autonomous was FRC 360 driving out into the middle of the field and spinning around. I think it was in the tetra game but I can’t quite remember.
