[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

I would imagine it would prevent you, for example, from encasing a pile of totes inside your robot, driving the whole mess onto the scoring platform, and parking there. See? Totes are on the platform! Or building a cage that stored a bunch of totes and then sliding the whole cage onto the platform. Or a ramp, bridge, or other shenanigans of the sort.

I think it was primarily meant to acknowledge that litter would be strewn all over the field and that one of the challenges would be to make sure the tote was not stacked on top of litter (allowing this could also be a safety issue if the stack became unstable).

A button that accidentally fell down, though? That seems like bureaucratic ruling to me. A lot of the rules in the handbook say "The INTENT of this rule is to ___ while making exceptions for ___", this could have been one of them.

When you start making exceptions to rules based on circumstance you devalue the rules and those who enforce them.