Let me remind everyone of the wording of R18:
Quote:
|
At an Event, Teams may have access to a static set of FABRICATED ITEMS that shall not exceed 30 lbs to be used to repair and/or upgrade their ROBOT. Items made at an Event do not count towards this weight limit.
|
(Per the blog, 30 is now 45, but that has not been reflected in a team update yet, so the rule I copied still says 30. I expect this will be rectified in the next team update)
To me, this implies that an actual robot is bagged and brought in. Combine that with R1:
Quote:
|
Each registered FRC team may enter only one (1) ROBOT into the 2014 FRC.
|
These two would seem to imply that, while you can bring in plenty of fabricated parts, you can't bring in a whole robot outside of the bag. And for that, I would use the "impartial observer" rule - if your grandmother was standing there looking at it and says "what a nice robot you built!" then it's a robot.
There was a similar issue a few years ago (2010) when it was bumped up to 65 lbs - some teams simply didn't bag anything because their entire robot was under 65 lbs. We really don't want to see teams walking in with a robot unbagged and some fabricated parts they want to attach to the robot bagged.