[Bob Steele]

Originally Posted by marshall

Oh boy... here I go again.

As the team with that second "robot"... I can tell you exactly what happened from my point of view (For everyone who has been wondering what 900 is up to this season, here ya go). Before I do, I want to say thank you to Jon and Frank from FIRST for working with us to clarify the rules and for being gracious professionals. Also, a massive thank you to all of the volunteers, staff, and especially the robot inspectors for the Palmetto regional. It has always been my personal favorite regional event to attend and you are the reason why.

We tagged two bags on Tuesday night before midnight (just like everyone else) and then we drove down to the event on Wednesday. It made no sense to us to leave our practice "robot" sitting in our lab when we could just bag it and use it as spare parts. We arrived at the venue for load-in and immediately explained the second bag to the inspector who checked us in (Hi Ben!).

The next morning (Thursday) we were the first team to weigh in for inspection and then we helped walk about 5 inspectors through the robot inspection process. Both the robot and spare parts were in our pit at this point and as we explained to everyone who asked about the well constructed set of spare parts, it would NEVER touch the real field without going through inspection (and it never did!!!!).

The only thing we were asked to do was to not take up space on or near the practice field with our spare parts if the ROBOT was on the real field or in the queue for the real field. Eventually someone (I don't know who) said something and the ban hammer came down hard and fast. We were told to cease operations on the spare parts and we did for about 2 hours on Thursday. At that point, Frank was on his way to the venue and we were waiting on him to arrive and give us a final ruling on our interpretation of the rules.

Frank arrived and I imagine a lively debate was had. We were eventually given the approval to go back to work with our spare parts and again the provision was that the spare parts should not be on or near the practice field if the ROBOT was on the real field.

We had a dynamics problem that was causing some pain for our driver while crossing defenses with the ROBOT. We ended up having to buy leg weights from the local Wal-Mart on Thursday night and adding them to the robot Friday morning. We went through an inspection after adding them to the ROBOT per the rules. It brought our weight up to ~117 and fixed(-ish) the dynamics problem.

Now is where it gets interesting... We had been modifying the spare parts to a lower height on Friday morning/afternoon to solve the dynamics problem more permanently. At the end of the day on Friday we made a choice to pull the shortened mechanism (shooter assembly and superstructure) from the spare parts and place it on the ROBOT after removing the full-height mechanism from the ROBOT. It was a frantic herd of Zebracorn momentum but we almost got it done completely on Friday night (Just ask 1114 how fast 900 can mobilize and they'll tell you!).

This of course ended up with us needing to be inspected again on Saturday morning. To make matters more interesting, due to the way the scheduling worked out, we happened to be in the 3rd match of the morning on Saturday so we sent our drive team to the QUEUE to wait for the ROBOT to arrive. We went through inspection again after opening ceremonies and the inspector found things that we needed to resolve and we all missed a loose wire on our radio (this impacted us in the match so we paid a real price for all of this frantic work). We were fortunate enough to just barely make the match and the inspector had to meet up with the robot near the field to apply the inspection sticker.

I'm proud of our students and mentors. Our team likes to do fun and interesting things and this regional was no different.

For one, it needs to/should be clarified about what makes a robot a ROBOT and I suspect there will be an update on it this week. If it is the control system then can a team replace their RoboRIO legally if it breaks? Can we swap them between rounds for code updates without being reinspected? If it is the drive base then can a team swap out drive bases if they dent their frame beyond repair?

For two, my proposed solution to the potential problem is simple. GET RID OF BAG AND TAG! Build season is not 6 weeks anymore and 30 pounds of parts that doesn't include COTS items is just silly.

Thank you for giving us your perspective on the issues.