[boomergeek]

Al,

Thanks for the correction.

The question is: other than minibots, how many pounds of fabricated items can a team bring intended to be used on OTHER teams robots? (For example, fabricated minibot deployment mechanisms).

I think the answer is Zero pounds. Do you interpret it a different way?

You can bring as much COTS and raw material as you like but anything fabricated (that is not COTS and is not part of your allowed robot weight or part of your withholding for YOUR robot) needs to be fabricated at the competition during open pit time.

As to your own robot, if you are bringing 30 pounds of spare parts ( duplicates of fabricated mechanisms on your robot) then the spirit of the rule, the robot you ship can be 120 pounds. If you bring 0 pounds of fabricated spare parts, then the robot you ship should only be 90 pounds. The robot you ship can be more than 90 pounds if it contains unmodified COTS or raw materials as ballast.

I think some teams bend the spirit of this rule by shipping a robot that starts weighing more than 120 pounds and then bring in 30 more pounds of additional different fabricated items. Then they modify to get under 120 pounds by picking the "best" of the 150+ pounds of fabricated items.

For example, if a team shipped a robot that weighed 120 pounds (with a fabricated arm that did not work well) and then decided that they wanted to fabricate a new and improved and dramatically different arm that weighed 30 pounds. Could they, in the spirit of the rule, bring in that arm knowing that they had already shipped a robot that weighed 120 pounds?