Stack Attack

The Human player period is 10 seconds at the start of the match where one designated person from each team may walk onto the field and pass or receive one or more of their four bins to their allied team's human player. This allowed teams to create stacks higher than the initial 4-high stacks. The human players needed to return to a pressure-sensitive pad before their robot was activated.

The autonomous period was 15 seconds long in Stack Attack. During the autonomous period, teams could use infrared sensors to hunt the opposing team's stacks, use the same sensors to follow white tape or use dead reckoning to navigate to the center stacks.

The human controlled phase began immediately after the autonomous period. During this phase, robots would attempt to amass the most bins on their side, while preventing the opposing teams from getting bins onto their scoring area and knocking down opposing stacks. Robots that were capable of stacking would use this time to begin building and protecting a stack of bins.

The most successful strategy in autonomous mode was to get the robot to run through the centre stack and push as many bins as possible onto that robot's scoring end. Since it was very difficult to move bins from one end of the field to the other, once most of the centre bins landed in one end, often that team would win. Teams could also try to seek out and knock over the stacks of bins that the human players had placed at the start of the match.

Often the main game was a chaotic period where teams would try and clear out their own zone while attempting to keep as many bins on their scoring section as possible. Robots that were capable of stacking would usually protect their stack for the entire match, then release it just as the match ended.