[jee7s]

The bumper zone was higher in 2010 to accommodate the soccer balls, as I recall. Though, I don't recall the exact height range.

I'm not the GDC or anything, but....IMHO the whole point of the bumper spec is to make sure that two robots both have a deformable surface (the bumper) at the same height for interactions. This way, the energy of the impact goes into the bumper and not into metal. Allowing teams to move the bumpers outside of the bumper zone really defeats this purpose. And, from my past experience with FRC, I can assure you that a bumper-to-bumper interaction is much friendlier to a frame than a metal-to-metal one.

So, yeah, the whole bumper zone could come down an inch or so, but GDC would still need to preserve the requirement that the bumper-to-bumper interaction occurs.