[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I actually impounded a spare robot as Lonestar LRI once. A team brought it in on Thursday morning to remove part of it for their competition robot. Since it was well over the withholding allowance, I told them to pull whatever they wanted or thought they needed right away (under withholding limits), then impounded the remainder for the rest of the regional. On account of the examples of it being illegal to keep a collection of spares in the parking lot and bring them in one at a time. They were understandably grumpy that they couldn't just leave it in their trailer instead of me impounding it, but I'd been approached by people concerned that they'd brought an ENTIRE spare robot. So I had to deal with appearances as well as actual rules at that point. I'm pretty sure Norm's forgiven me by now.

All of which is to say that practice robots, spare parts, and withholding allowances make for lots of complications. While the 5.5.2 blue box is a little clumsy, a separate rule would likely be just as awkward to cover cases like bringing a practice robot to practice with but not use for parts. You couldn't possibly cover that case with any other existing rule, but writing up a rule for that specific case would likely miss others that I haven't thought of. The blue box entirely rules out bringing a practice robot to help your team in any fashion, bagged or not, which is just a more general case of the specific case above.

Also, does the 5.5.2 blue box have some sort of unintended, deleterious consequences? It doesn't seem so to me, so it seems like a pretty good update.

The biggest problem is that for teams that did bag two things that look like "robots" (not ROBOTs) for the intended purpose of having spare parts they will be in trouble for something that they had no idea was illegal and it's already in the bag(s). Also the current rule does not prevent teams from assembling a 2nd robot at the event, you just can't bring it to the event. You can still build it there from mechanisms that you bring.