Frank and coaches,

  When discussing the Service Dog Action mission, M02, I don't think that it is more restrictive than many other FLL missions, this year and in the past.  It may be a matter of perspective.  The challenge of this mission is to navigate through a constrained curved path, and the triggering of the dog is the indication that you've succeeded.  (Going west is required because of the design of the triggering mechanism.)  This is not inherently an "operate a machine to obtain a desired result" mission (although that is part of it, of course).

  Your teams have the freedom to decide how that traveling is accomplished, as well as freedom of design to ensure that the fence is triggered, sequencing of actions, and so on.

  In regard to the mission constraint that the fence must be down "because" of the travel and "after" the travel, some actions are definitely not allowed.  Examples:
   a)  robot sitting in Base, triggering the Warning Fence, and then driving between the barriers later.  The team would not earn points for M02.
  b)  robot driving east of the fence, pulls it down and then, without stopping ,continues and drives through the barrier path from the west.  No points.
  c)  requiring the robot to be shorter than the distance between the easternmost barrier and the fence, so that the fence isn't triggered until after the robot has passed all of the barriers--not reasonable.
  d) What about a 20" long segmented bendable robot that enters the barriers from the south entrance and triggers the fence while a substantial part of the robot is still on the northward section of the barriers--probably okay.  (and cool--send me your pictures!)

  VA-DC FLL will be having its annual head referees conclave later this month, and we'll definitely talk through exactly what we understand "after" to mean for the mechanics of this mission, and how we will rule on it.  "Because" seems pretty clear to me, and easy to adjudicate.  GP2 says to use the common conversational meaning.

  As usual, Rule D04, Robot, doesn't distinguish between the Robot and most active attachments. I think that everyone understands that.

Steve Scherr
Virginia-DC FLL Referee Advisor

P.S.   Except for purposes of tournament registration, we prefer "Advisors" or "Facilitators" or "Organizers" to "Overlords".  (Except occasionally during tournaments, c.f. R19, bullet 1, last sub-bullet, moderated by GP5, #4)  :-)

  





On Tue, Sep 6, 2016 at 12:32 AM, Frank Levine <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi All,
  I'm having a heck of a time figuring out the constraints for M02 (Service Dog Action)

"The Fence must be down because the Robot completely crossed it from the west, after traveling between the Barriers"

If my team wants to design an attachment to push the fence down and then cross it... is the fence down because the robot completely crossed it?  I don't think so... it's down because the robot pushed it down... then the robot crossed the fence.  It's certainly not down because the robot crossed it.  It seems to me that the only legal solution is to have the robot push the fence down crossing from the west.  This seems very 'un-FLL', in that there is no freedom to interpret... the method is completely specified.

Any clarification from our FLL overlords would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
Frank Levine



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