Stack Attack
From Free net encyclopedia
Stack Attack is the game for the 2003 FIRST Robotics competition.
The object of this game is for each two player alliance to rack up the more points than the other team. High scores are achieved by a combination of stacking plastic crates in your scoring zone and placing single bins on the floor of the scoring zone itself.
Two alliances of two teams each are randomly chosen; the red alliance is pitted against the blue alliance. Each of the robots starts in a corner of the neutral zone in the center of the rectangular arena. 29 plastic bins are stacked in a pyramid shape on top of the raised middle of the platform, and the game begins. One human player on each team (two per alliance) has 10 seconds to stack a total of 8 additional bins in their own scoring zone. (More on this will be explained below.)
Once this 10 second "human player period" has finished, a 15 second Autonomous Robot Control period begins. During this time, power is sent to the robots, but they must navigate using nothing but the power of their own brains, so to speak. In other words, the robots must control themselves, using either optical sensors or touch sensors or dead reckoning movement programming, which must be entered into the robot by astute programmers beforehand. No matter what happens during this 15 second period, humans must not and cannot interfere. The four robots are left to their own devices.
After 15 seconds have elapsed, the robots "wake up" out of their autonomous stupor and can finally be controlled by the human entities with the joysticks, who are standing outside of the arena entirely. The controllers are now free to direct their robots as they wish. At this point in time, anything goes: robots can push crates into their scoring zones or out of the other alliance's scoring zones. Robots can try to stack boxes in order to increase their score multipliers. The robots can do basically whatever they want -- short of intentionally mangling the arena or other robots, any sort of creative approach to scoring is legal. This period of humans controlling the robots via wireless connections continues for 1:45, at which points the bots automatically shut down and the match is declared to be over.
Scoring is fairly simple for the entire competition. Each team has a predetermined scoring area on one side of the ramp. The score at the end of the 2:00 competition is equal to (#crates in the scoring area - #crates in the multiplier stack) X (height of the multiplier stack) = total score The multiplier stack might be remaining from the human player pyramid, or a robot might have created a stack of its own using an advanced arm system. Only the largest multiplier stack counts in the final tally. Also, a bonus of 25 points for the entire alliance is gained for each of the robots on that alliance who end up on the top of the ramp at the end of the 2:00 competition.