[Dale]

There's nothing unethical about it in my opinion. I don't however think it's a good use of resources in most cases. Having two different robots means there are twice as many opportunities for students to experience the design process...the sense of discovery that only comes from doing the work, prototyping, and making the tradeoffs.

At some point you can't have any more people doing design work without tripping over yourselves. What that number is depends on how modular you can make things and the nature of the challenge. I've never seen a FRC challenge that couldn't be designed by a half dozen people. You could maybe double that but I doubt any more than that would be manageable. The communication overhead just gets too large.

The whole point of FRC is to expose as many students as possible to engineering. Does having two identical robots accomplish that? In the case when one team is so on the ropes that they can barely get a box on wheels to function maybe so. In most cases, though, I'd say no.