Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Copioli
Al,
I think the underlying theme of this thread is that the FRC rules have been unclear, at best. It looks like your opinion is clear so please help reduce an obvious Q & A question and use your influence to get the 2015 FRC rules to be clear on this issue.
Paul
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Message received.
I do not think a team that used these in the past was cheating. They read the rules one way or didn't consider the interpretation I am making in this thread. This is quite common with parts that are not used on a lot of robots. Inspectors who don't know an item on sight alone may or may not ask for identification or description. FRC teams make some great robots so it follows that those teams will try and find an advantage in using a COTS part that someone hasn't thought of using. Even inspectors with a fair amount of industrial experience may not have seen some of these items. Inspectors with little experience may not recognize some of the things LRIs are trained to look for.
For an interesting story...A few years ago at an LRI training weekend in NH, we asked teams to supply a few robots for our training purposes. One of the group activities was to walk through a typical inspection process with me. I showed them how I interact with the team, how i use the Inspection Checklist to work through the robot and how I attack individual systems separately so that I get a look inside the robot for several different items (mechanical, electrical and pneumatic). As I was "working the list" I looked down and noticed an illegal item on the robot. I asked if anyone saw a problem and only one of the LRIs in training caught it. It was a good training day for that reason.