Robotics Education & Competition Foundation
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Official Q&A: VRC 2018-2019: Turning Point

Usage Guidelines All Questions

191: Contacting Platform


974C
20-Dec-2018

To prevent being pushed off the center platform, our team was looking at a mechanism that drops a small peg out of the back of the robot over the front of the platform. We would only contact two faces(#1 Our wheels on the top of the platform, #2 the peg only touching the outer edge of the platform) ,it would not clamp on anything and our robot could easily be removed. Would this be legal or would this considered be grappling.

Answered by Game Design Committee

With such a mechanism, <SG10> would be the primary rule in question:

<SG10> Don’t clamp your Robot to the field. Robots may not intentionally grasp, grapple or attach to any Field Elements, including the Platforms. Strategies with mechanisms that react against multiple sides of a Field Element in an effort to latch or clamp onto said Field Element are prohibited. The intent of this rule is to prevent Teams from both unintentionally damaging the field and/or from anchoring themselves to the field.

Provided that the head referee determines that the Robot has not violated <SG10> (i.e. has not anchored or clamped to the Platform), this would be legal. As described, it sounds like it would not be clamping to the platform, but as always, it is impossible to provide a blanket ruling based on of a written description of a hypothetical design.

Updated on 1/14/19 for additional clarity: It should also be noted that any mechanism used to accomplish this would also be subject to <SG2>, as explained in this similar Q&A post.