I was thinking, if someone had to play defense against tray bots, could they purposely tip their tray forward to ‘knock out’ their cubes, or would it be illegal for reasons such as it being too destructive or potentially damaging?
Edit: my team doesn’t have a tray bot, so we’re not sure how destructive such an action would be for a tray not.
As long as you don’t get entangled, this type of defense is completely acceptable. Do watch out however, if you tip them over completely, they can somewhat complain to get their way.
One rule to be weary of here is <SG5>:
(emphasis mine)
If you tip your tray forward while an opponent robot is pushing you around the field, and some of your cubes are propelled into the opponent robot, then that could be a violation of <SG5> - especially if they get stuck in there and impede the functionality of the opponent robot’s mechanisms.
Assuming you don’t violate <SG5> or any other rules (<G12>, <SG7>, etc.), then tilting your tray up in this scenario is not prohibited.
Intentionally being the key word. If someone is playing defense on you and a cube falls on their robot I don’t think the refs will see that as intentional.
Hmm, as a ref, I think there’s a fine line there.
Although there are inherent limitations to discussing these sorts of things in hypotheticals, here are a couple of examples:
If robot A is being pushed by opponent robot B, and as a result of that pushing a cube falls out of robot A’s tray and get stuck on robot B, then it seems unlikely that robot A “intentionally drop[ped] or place[d] Cubes on an opponent Robot” - thus, no violation of <SG5>.
If, on the other hand, the driver of robot A reacted to being pushed by robot B by intentionally tilting A’s tray upwards, and that caused one of A’s cubes to get stuck on B, then that could conceivably be a violation of <SG5> in my view. Even if the intent of A’s driver was not to jam cubes in B (e.g., dumping cubes onto the field, or changing robot A’s center of gravity), A still took an intentional action that resulted in a cube being dropped on an opponent robot. So depending on the exact situation I could see that as a potential violation of <SG5>.