In this year’s FRC Challenge, Destination: Deep Space, teams on each alliance work together on their space station. Each alliance consists of three teams. The game starts with a 15 second ‘sandstorm’. During the sandstorm, blinds drop over the window of the driver stations, so that the teams can either choose to drive by a camera on their robot, or run the robot autonomously and the robots run without driver input. The cargo ship in the middle of the field is pre-loaded with ‘cargo’ or ‘hatches’. Cargo are 13” kick-balls, and hatches are plastic discs that attach to the front of the cargo ship and rocket. At the end of sandstorm, any cargo that don’t have hatches in front of them fall out of the ship.
For the rest of the match, cargo requires a hatch to hold them. The remainder of the match is called ‘Teleoperated’, and the drivers have an unobstructed view of the field. They continue to work to fill the rocket and cargoship. If a team can fill a rocket with hatchse and cargo, they earn a ranking point.
In the last 30 second of the game, the teams can climb up the ‘habitat zone’ on the driver station wall or park on the ramp to earn points. If an alliance can get at least 15 points by climbing, that also earns them a ranking point. At the end of the game, each cargo in either the rocket or cargo ship earns 3 points, and each hatch earns 2. The alliance at the end of the match with the most points wins.
