A quick search of the VEX Toss Up Manual using the term “entang…” reveals the following:
Interestingly enough I didn’t find anything about what to do if two robots become entangled. There used to be a clause that allowed the field controllers to pause the match in order to separate the robots quickly and then resume.
I’ve had this come up in a match I was hosting, I was MC and instructed field control to pause the match. I then carefully stepped into the field, made sure I didn’t bump any of the playing objects or robots and quickly untangled the robots. One still couldn’t move, oh well sucks for them but at least the other now could and no one had to be DQ’ed.
I should make this clear, I actually stepped over the judges authority here. This was because we had new first time judges, I had a healthy relationship with them and knew that this solution would make everyone happy.
In a later case a real judgement call had to be made and I differed to them.
It was a case regarding whether or not an action that ended up toppling another robot was intentional. If it was considered intentional that team would be DQ’ed. I told them that I would be willing to rerun the match but ultimately they decided the action was intentional and that team was sadly DQ’ed (I was rooting for them, bunch of middle school girls competing at an HS comp and doing extremely well).
So here’s the deal, if I were judging that match I would have DQ’ed your son if I thought his robot was poorly constructed in a way that was asking for an entanglement issue to arise, otherwise I would have had field control pause the match so the bots could be untangled.
People seem to forget that letting something like this go doesn’t just screw the guy who gets DQ’ed for being entangled. But by allowing the other teams robot stay disabled, you allow the result of the rest of the match to be altered. Maybe that entangled robot could have scored some match affecting points and maybe without those points the other team wins even though one of their robots is going to get a DQ, the opposing team still looses a qual. (also happened to me).
Referring to the last paragraph of your post, about match effecting. We had a match where a team tore a big ball out of our intake after we had high hung and latched. That team was obviously disqualified, but the point swing ended up giving their alliance the win and us the loss, despite the match being drastically effected by the illegal maneuver.
I do think this is a unfortunate situation that doesn’t have a good solution, because disqualifying the whole randomly selected team could put you at risk of poor sportsmanship from an ally and other things like that.
wut, cody, we never had “paused” matches to untangle…
strange, i should bring it up because it makes soo much sense
and i do agree that the current DQ rules may be a little “broken”
because if you are dq’d for pinning in the first 20 seconds. you can just go to their better robot and pin them for the remainder of the match. you are already DQ’d, but your alliance partner will still get the win (assuming your alliance won)
That is why they don’t announce DQ until after the match. Many refs don’t do it but the rules state to DQ after the match.
I can’t remember any rules allowing for pausing but I am positive that Cody made the right call. Inspection eliminates most of the entanglement risks so most of the time it is a fluke that causes robots to get caught on one another. I am afraid with this being a stated rule as robots being moved a foot apart could give a robot a better location on the field.
Uh, maybe I made that up. But screw it, the field control software has a pause button and I used it. So if there isn’t a pause procedure, why not make one?
So what your match on an extremely rare occasion goes on another 30 seconds, for most events that’s perfectly fine.
