The second meeting was on a half day, which is probably why not a lot of students showed up. We still had a good attendance, though, 3 of our last years members came.
We got the last years robot operational, new members have a chance to drive it. We watched the game video again. It turns out there was a lot of things unclear in the video, so we had a long brainstorming session with the official game rules and found out these important things:
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When pressing beacon buttons in the autonomous period, the only thing that counts is the color of the beacon at the end of autonomous period. It is the same as for the driver controlled period, but the movie makes it sounds like you get points every time you press a beacon. The movie is wrong.
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During the autonomous period, it does not matter which robot pushed the large ball. What matters is whether the aliance colored ball touches the ground at the end of the autonomous period.
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When scoring small particles into vortices, it does not matter what color the particle is. The only important thing is the color of the vortex. However, there is a rule that we overlooked which prohibits each aliance to handle scoring elements of the opposing aliance. That means we are only alowed to use the particles of our aliance color! If we shoot such particle into the opposing aliance vortex, though, it will count as a point for the opposing aliance!
Furter question: what happens if we accidentally handle the particles of the opposing aliance color?
There were still some questions that we were not able to answer, for example:
- Can a red robot park on a blue vortex ramp, or vice versa? If that happens, who gets the points?
There is an official questions and answers forum where teams can ask questions like this. There already are some answered questions. I highly recommend all team members read the answers. There are several answers pertaining to a scoring strategy that we talked about during the meeting! It turns out the strategy is actually illegal.
I am looking forward to seeing you next Wednesday!