Based on the training video…
“any… deliberate form of control” is not allowed. I think a robot specifically designed to herd three mobile goals would violate this.
Based on these Q & As…
https://vexforum.com/t/answered-possessing-opposing-mobile-goals/41460/1
https://vexforum.com/t/answered-hoarding-opposing-mobile-goals/41594/1
… the GDC clearly ruled it legal to hoard opposing mobile goals
Huh. It seems the referee training video needs to be more detailed, or else there is a contradiction.
You need to bear in mind that all these q&a were done in May - and in vex context, that means a Long time ago, and it will/may be superseded by the latest changed in ruling.
Eg. Back in May, it was still legal to expand to 48".
I’m not sure how this has been ruled in past years, but do the referee videos have the same weight as a Q&A? That is, are they just recommended interpretations, or actually the same as the rules?
Referee videos are the official interpretations of the rules.
And all referees are supposed to make the same decisions as shown in the videos.
As for q&a, while it is considered as official, the answers (that was done before the revised rules) may not have reflected the latest changed in ruling.
Inspiration for this robot comes from out starstruck robot, Mr. Clean.
It’s the pushbot and yes we were first seed with a pushbot and we also won with it.
I am the programmer for 195a.
before yall flame me about the auto, i made the auto in 5 mins before the finals
It looks like deliberately hoarding an opposing mobile goal, as long as you’re not sliding anything under it or manipulating it with a claw, is fully legal.
Yup… based on the latest q&a it is fully legal 
We did thought of hoarder bot before we decided to build a wallbot for singvex.
We decided against it because we are not confident of capturing more than 2 mobile goals.
But if 195a can do it, then great
In practice this sometimes ends up being the case, but I don’t think the gdc ever means for early season Q&As to have less weight. They should be revised as needed without us having to go back and ask if anything has changed.
I think more often the ref training videos are made to be a little misleading in some areas for the sake of simplicity.
Interesting. I like the strategy you’re into; I was kinda toying with the same idea over summer (but using a very fast robot to bull-doze around to grab their Mobile Goals…but that’s illegal now, isn’t it?). I also like you’re area-denial idea with the expanding portions. However, I’d be a little careful with that…the judges might be able to rule that as a type of cone hoarding if they think that you “possess” all those cones. I think that the “meta” this year for offensive robots will be speed and precision instead of capacity, so it’ll a race to see who can grab the most amount of MG’s and shove them into the far scoring zone before stacking cones. The issue, for me at least, is deciding how to combat it.
Sorry if that was a long rant…I just want to talk to someone who will listen and respond 
Thanks!
Nope
The area denial is really only when we have 3 MGs and park ourselves in front of the human player loading station, thus further restricting the capacity for the opposing alliance to score. This could also create a situation wherein it may be difficult to access the zones, depending on the robot’s orientation, and final size expansion. SG7 states that area denial/“blocking access to portions of the field” is illegal for 2 robots to do, not just one. So this could work.
Do you mean MGs or cones? We do intend on hoarding MGs, not cones. However, grabbing one of the far MGs is going to be difficult without at least grabbing one cone.
On the subject of the opposing alliance taking MGs into a scoring zone then retrieving them for scoring later, it is a double edged sword. If they put the MGs into the 5 point zone as a form of safety, I believe that our alliance can go in and take them, only if we do not touch the starting bar (SG10). However, if the opposing alliance attempts to put MGs into the 10 point zone, it may be difficult to retrieve the MGs if the robots retrieving them have a similar intake to 8059Z, being a straight linear intake, rather than a chain bar such as the RI3D “RIPPER” robot. Plus, there can be an active defense robot like 8059A or 8059J that can block the robot from coming out of the corner of the field, as long as it is not entrapping them. It can also slow them down in terms of total cone scoring, as they can spend time trying to take the MGs out of the 10pt zone. Additionally, the two closet opposing MGs are most likely going to be taken by us, as they are the primary targets in auto.
Let’s think about this from our perspective in terms auto:
We really need 3 MGs in order to make this effective. (4 is almost game over, 2 depends on your alliance partner alot, and 1 or 0 is a guaranteed loss. 3 MGs for most qual matches will work because I expect our partners to get all 4 MGs into the zones, and defend the rest of the match. If we grab 3 they are basically behind by 35 points. [30 for the MGs in the 10pt zone, assuming they put the 4th in the 20pt zone. 5 for the bonus high stack for the 10pt zone.])
Thus, we have 5 autos in the works (ask @CHINESEISASIAN for questions). 1 and 2: Grab the 2 nearest opposing MGs, and then attempt to grab the 3rd farthest one, one auto for each side. 3 and 4: Instead of grabbing the 2 nearest MGs, we go for the furthest MG on one side, then swing back around to get the 2 nearest opposing MGs. One for each side. 5: perform a 1 or 2 auto, but as we grab the 2nd MG, we swing around and grab the MG on the opposite side, basically a “fake out” auto.
1 and 2 will be our default autos. 3 and 4 will be alternatives if they try to rush their nearest MGs for security. 5 is for if one robot tries a near MG rush and the other does not, basically trolling them. ** I HIGHLY DOUBT that they will grab a far MG in auto, as our far MGs are in the way, and there is a large amount of cones in the way. ** Thus, referring to your quote, these two I would not worry about in auto, as they are safe, IMO, thus the 3 and 4 autos. Teleop might be a different story, but it will be close when we try to get the two near opposing MGs, if not in auto. Basically a push battle for them, and considering we have 8 High Torque drive motors, and they will probably have 4 or at most 6, and probably not High Torque, as those robots that will try to steal them will probably have the foresight of us stealing them, and will probably have good stacking abilities, and an OK drive, we will have those MGs in our robot one way or another.
Plus, we will have a containment system consisting of a vertical slide door, which will contain 2 MGs and the 3rd will be in our lexan sliding wall things. . Look at 195A on the Red Alliance.
And that is how we plan on combating a MG rush to place them in a safe zone.
You are allowed to touch the opposing starting bar, as it is considered part of the 5 point zone. However, you may not contact an opposing robot touching the opposing starting bar.
If you have another defensive partner, then your alliance will simply lose. Period. So I wouldn’t factor that into your evaluation positively.
If the partner is an absolute pure defense robot, like 8059J or like us, I 100% agree with you. (Although I would enjoy watching the match and would find it pretty funny.)
However, for a 8059A or a mixed offense/defense robot, I think that we could pull out a win. For example: We steal 3 of their 4 Mobile Goals and park in front of the Loader, then our partner attempts to score our 4 MGs as fast as possible. Then they harass and bully the opposing alliances robots and prevent them from scoring on the Stationary Goal and prevent them from stacking Cones on the Mobile Goal by pushing them away from cones and denying them from placing the Mobile Goal into the 20pt zone, while trying to not get penalized. If there is a robot like the red one at 5:00, in this video , that can put a cone on a Mobile Goal in auto, that would be even better. It will be close, but possible. Plus, I am not expecting there to be many outstanding robots at the competitions where we are going that can put up gargantuan amounts of cones on a Stationary Goal, as we are only going to local CT events, and I am pretty sure not even Regionals.
I am not sure about how competitive your region is. But we did an analysis of hoarder bot for singvex, but we felt (and I still believe) that it can’t guarantee us a win.
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We are confident of capturing 2 mobile goals that are the nearest. But there is no way that we can be fast enough to take the 3rd.
The opponent robots will be mainly at least a 4 or 6 motor base at high speed setting. It will definitely reach the the other 2 mobile goals before us.
And like what you have mentioned - you can’t guarantee a win with just 2 mobile goals. -
and even if we go straight for the farthest mobile goals… the chance of opponents reaching those mobile goals before us will definitely be higher.
At most we will be disrupting their auton. But we will also be disrupting with our own auton when we clash with their robots. -
when going for the 2 nearest mobile goals, there is a slim chance that we might be hindering our own alliance’s auton in scoring the stationary goal or even in disrupting their routine in capturing our own mobile goal.
And for the record - 8059a did picked 8059j for elimination. But they did it knowing full well that they won’t be able to win the Top alliances.
It was 59a last competition, they just wanted to have some fun. And I must say that it was really fun (and sometimes comical) in watching these 2 robots going about in being a disruptive force
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@The_Rubber_Spoon
I wouldn’t underestimate the rest of the CT teams if I were you. If you, do you’ve got another thing coming. Plus CT teams aren’t the only teams competing at local CT competitions.
Plus it’s kind of rude to compete when you’re not even trying to make regionals
True. Every year there are teams that are leagues ahead of any of the robots I worked on (6106 and 8370 in NBN and 5150 and 4478 in SS pop into my mind first). I also expect Airstrike to show up at one of the events we are at. Actually, one of main reason why we designed this robot was that I expect that those teams would build better robots than us, to the point where I decided that we had no chance in a straight up scoring match if we were in a match with any of the top subteams of the teams listed (The Masuk event comes to mind with 4478 and 8370). So, I decided to try and limit their scoring, and in turn making them have less chance for failure.
The reason why we are not going to regionals is that we are a FRC team first, and a Vex team second. If we had the chance to go to Vex worlds with a competitive robot, we still wouldn’t go. Why? We are a FRC team first, and a Vex team second. Anything we do in FRC is more important than anything in Vex. In fact, last year, we didn’t even go to regionals because the Waterbury District Event was on the same weekend. I’m pretty sure we still won’t go this year. We use Vex as primarily an introductory tool for incoming students to learn scouting, strategy, robot design, so on and so forth, and we use Vex to see who we want on build/design in FRC by how much effort and time they put into Vex. This is actually why I was on FRC build and pit this year, and ended up being the Human Player at IRI.
I do expect some teams (4478, 5150, 6106, and 8370) to have robots that can intake a Mobile Goal in auto, but I also expect that a larger number of teams will not be able to. Not every robot will be a regional or worlds competitive robot, in fact probably a vast majority of them for the first 2-3 events will not have Mobile Goal autos. From what I have seen, CT is less competitive than Singapore. Plus there might be some that do not intake their Mobile Goal in auto or don’t have a Mobile Goal intake. If worst comes to worst, we will take our Piledriver and door off and add the 2 motors to the drive, then change all to High Speed motors and change the wheels to 3.25 inch diameter wheels, though I have not looked at whether or not this would work, but it probably will not.