Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamHeard
So, to achieve this a team could bag a junk drive with some electronics and carry in a good deal of systems that would then be assembled with cannibalized parts from the bagged robot to create a robot out of what was just a pile of dumb systems.
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so long as they aren't carrying in something that would be considered a ROBOT... which is where the whole debate comes in
At what point do we consider an assembly or collection of parts a robot? I don't think the rules are very clear on this - the definition of ROBOT is "It includes all of the basic systems required to be an active participant in the game: power, communications, control, mobility, and actuation." So a strict reading of that would be that anything without a cRIO is not a ROBOT, even if it has everything else you need and you just bolt the cRIO on when you get to the competition. I don't feel that would be in the spirit of the rules, however.
Last year, there was a certain Minnesota team that competed with what we dubbed "a different robot at each event". They carried in a different shooter (under 30 lbs) to each event, and spent the first day of the event making major modifications to their robot to support the new shooter. The end result was that every event I saw their robot at, it looked like they had a different robot! In this case, however, it was clear that what they were bringing in would be considered an upgraded assembly intended to replace something on their robot.