Quote:
Originally Posted by nuggetsyl
Even if a team coppied a design, the real question would be did they learn something? Reverse engineering is not always that simple.
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It's possible to do this now even with the with-holding allowance. You don't need to take your robot home in order to do it. In 2011, my old team (2079) built an elevator that didn't run smoothly and we had trouble calibrating it. We took the 35 pound with-holding allowance (I think it was 35) and built a completely new 4-bar linkage manipulator lightly based off of the design from 148 that we were heavily inspired by (our linkage used box tubing, but the dynamics of the system were similar). I still question myself as to whether this was the right thing to do, but we learned a lot along the way, and it made our competitive season more successful.
Long story short, even if you can't take your robot home, it's still possible to make drastic iterations that can be influenced by successes of other teams.