[EricH]

Originally Posted by dudefise

Relaxing the bumper rules but bringing them back would help quite a bit. Perhaps a "bumpers at your own risk" rule with guidelines as to materials and precise construction, and then allowing teams to work out the areas of their robot that need to be bumpered.

I prefer the '06-'07 bumper rules, myself. They were quite simple: You could have "standard" bumpers, or not. If you had them, they had their own weight limit. If you didn't, that was your choice. And you could cover as much or as little of the robot as you liked. '08 and '09 weren't bad, either--there was a certain percentage of the perimeter that had to be covered (though '09 forced a trailer hitch to fit in the uncovered percentage... ouch).