[Discussion] Ball holding

During the virtual competition, it became apparent that the current ball-holding rules are too strict, especially when it comes to ball holding between multiple robots. At the moment, the rules state:

holds the ball for more than 1 second in a way that the ball cannot be removed from
the player. […] More than half of the ball’s volume must be outside the convex hull of the player, projected to the ground, for the ball to be considered removable. If the ball enters the convex hull repeatedly, it must be removable in between for the majority of 940 the time. If more than one player of a team is in the vicinity of the ball (defined as less than 0.75m in KidSize and 1.5m in AdultSize), the convex hull is taken around all the players of a team, which prevent the removal of the ball.

We have seen that applying the rule strictly as the autoreferee does lead to a lot of free kicks. We see two options for improving this rule:

  1. Prolonging the time - instead of 1 second, we could make it 5
  2. For ball holding between multiple robots, we could decrease the definition of the vicinity of the ball. The aim of the rule is to prevent robots from forming a circle around the ball that would make it impossible for robots of the opposing team to approach the ball without committing a forceful contact offense. However, at the moment the circle means that two robots could potentially be 1.5 m away from each other in KidSize and still commit ball holding, even though it would clearly be possible for other players to take the ball. So decreasing the definition of the vicinity of the ball could prevent penalizing robots too often for ball holding.

I believe that we should do both. 1 second can lead to the ball being called as held even if it is just rolling through the positions of several robots. I believe that 3 seconds would be a good time.

For the distance: I think that the distance should be decreased to half the current distance. For reference: 1.5 m is the diameter of the center circle in KidSize. A group of robots can clearly not be considered holding the ball if they are this far away from it.

Agree with @Bitbots_Jasper