STACK ATTACK

2003

Teams started in a gray-boxed area on either side of the giant ramp. When the game begins, one human player from each team competing (4 total) go on the field and place bins (4 bins per team, with 8 per alliance, and 16 total) in their colored area. The bins have reflective tape on them so opposing robots can knock over bins in autonomous mode, but more on that latter. The human players have 15 seconds to place the bins, and then step onto a pressure sensitive mat to tell the software they are off the field. If done in 10 seconds, that team will enter into autonomous mode when all teams are on the mats. If done in 15 seconds, the teams won't enter autonomous mode, but will work afterwards. If the human player doesn’t return in 15 seconds, the robot is disabled for the match.

After all the human players are on the mats, the robots will then enter autonomous mode for 15 seconds, in which the robots move and operate on their own through programming and sensors. There were many types of autonomous modes, with more on that in a latter section.

After autonomous mode, the robots then enter into 1:45 seconds of human controlled time. During this time, human controllers could push bins outside of their opposing alliance scoring zone, stack bins in their own, which multiplies the whole score of bins by how tall the stack is (but the bins in the stack are NOT counted as part of the total), and even park themselves on top of the ramp to block oncoming traffic. At the end of the game, robots would hurry up to the platform, since for each robot entirely on the ramp, the alliance gets 25 points.