[dtengineering]

Having built robots without bumpers, I'll second Al's comment about their value on the playing field. They have also eliminated the "wedge" robot designs that would just go around tipping other robots... there weren't many of them, but I'm glad they are gone from FRC. (Don't get me wrong... I think they are great for Battlebots, but FRC is "non-contact like basketball" as I often describe it.)

I also wanted to add that the requirement for bumpers has probably saved several thousand dollars in damages to school walls, doors, and the shins of slow-moving humans. For most of our robots, they spent far, FAR more time doing demos, test runs, and R&D back at the school and in the community than they did in competition. The bumpers make it easy to let kids take the robot for a spin, and turn the occasional error in autonomous mode testing from an "Oh... that's bad." to an "Ooops."

But on the main topic of the thread... we built our robot almost entirely of baltic birch plywood one year... the bumpers were backed by 1/2" ply. We never did intentional destructive testing with that setup... but I'm pretty sure that it was bulletproof as far as FRC applications are concerned.

Jason