[Jon Stratis]

This is a bit of a tough area to come up with a hard "Rule" on - there's an entire spectrum of what many would consider "reuse", and no obvious gap that would separate acceptable from non-acceptable.

First, lets cover the obvious - If you build something before the season starts, you can't use it. Period. End of story (in 2012, at least... we need to wait a few days to make sure things haven't changed for this year!). All parts on the robot must have actually been built this season.

Now, what about the not-so-obvious? Let me give you some examples.

In 2008 we used an elevator. That elevator was held together using small plates with bearings on either side. The plate got bolted to one section of the elevator, and the bearings would then ride up and down the next section. It worked out well for us, and in 2011 we did almost exactly the same thing. I say almost, because the elevators were quite different. For the part that matters here, 2008 used 1x2 box tubing, 2011 used 1x1 box tubing. So, our plates were 1" smaller in 2011. Reuse of a design concept? Yes. Reuse of a design? No. There were differences (although the difference is minimal), and there was no CAD or specific design tolerances - we just built it and eyeballed where the holes should be each time.

How about another example... in 3 of the past 6 years we've used a 6 wheel, drop center design. Every time we used KoP wheels in the middle, with Omni wheels on the corners. They were all chained together, and chains run up to the gearbox included in the KoP for that particular year. We ended up with something that was virtually identical each year. Reuse of a design concept? Definitely. Reuse of a design? Technically, no. There was no specific design we reused. It was built with the KoP chassis and parts given to us (except for the omni wheels), which meant that things naturally turned out pretty similar. There are only so many ways to chain together a pair of wheels!

One last example. This year, you want to use CIMple boxes instead of the provided ToughBox Mini's. So, you pull them off last year's robot and stick them on. Reuse of a concept? Not really. Reuse of a design? Again, not really... However, the CIMple boxes, if I remember right, come unassembled. So, reusing them in this way is technically illegal, as they aren't in their COTS condition (you would have to disassemble them and reassemble for it to be legal). For my team, we often reuse gear boxes from one year to the next (especially BaneBots ones). While you can approach it and think "taking them apart and putting them back together to meet the technical definition of the rule sucks", it's much better to think "We should take them apart, clean them, and understand what sort of wear goes on during the season. do we need to replace any gears? What happened to the grease that was in the gearbox, and why does it look nasty now?". It turns into a learning experience where the students not only get the same experience they would if purchased new, but additional experience they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.


For me personally, I draw the line for my team by asking the question "what did you learn doing that?" If you can say the students learned something the first time it was built (off-season or previous year) that wasn't learned re-building it, then you have a problem. Many times, if we want to "reuse" a previous design, we'll look at it, figure out the good and the bad, and look for ways to improve it.

This off-season, our team built 2 arms that work in different ways on 2 vex robots we threw together (we've never built an arm before). If we decide to build a robot with an arm once the game is released, you can bet those two arms will be front and center to aid in our design, and we might end up with something that looks pretty similar to one or the other.