[scuba_sm]

The other thing that may be limiting some of the creative ideas that people have suggested is the number, and power of the motors given to us. Two chippies, two drills, two window motors, a van door motor, two globes, and two fisher-prices. Sure, you can do a lot with that, but each type of motor has something that it is good at, either speed, torque, or a combination of the two. You are also limited in pneumatic cylinders. Springs have some pretty heavy restrictions on them, and our power source is, as ever, the 12 volt battery. All those are limitations. An effective bipedal robot would be difficult to use with these limitations, because you would have to have power at least three joints both ways, on each leg. If you do it with pneumatics, your pump will be running non-stop, and you will drain your battery quite quickly. If you wanted to do it with motors, you would have to mount them, and find a way to translate rotational motion into linear motion. You would also have to build the correct gearing so that it would operate at the correct speed with the correct amount of power. Neither of those problems are insurmountable, but think about how much easier, and how much more effective it would be to build a "box". Uneven terrain? Treads, with a 4 motor, two speed transmission. Lots of obstacles? Three degrees of freedom bot, or crab drive.
Canned? Yes. Effective? Definitely.
The other thing to worry about is building it in 6 weeks. Remember, you can't start building this thing until the game is unveiled. It doesn't matter how well your plans are layed out, and how much you've tried to think of everything, there are only so many hours of shop time between kick off, and ship date. Some of those ideas would take a very long time to build.

Now, some people may start shouting to release restrictions, but think about the "real world" for a moment. Lets say you want to design a car. Now, right off, you have a fairly good set of restrictions. Most important, it has to be safe to others, and it's passengers. Next, it has to keep up with other traffic. It can't damage the roadway. That tosses out walking cars (can't keep up with traffic with short legs to bring it down low enough to be safe, if you give it long legs, it may step on another car. That's not safe.) It also tosses out tracks. Metal treads rip up pavement like nothing else. Rubber ones wear out really fast, and are hard to change. Don't believe me? Take a look at some of the treads on bots out there. they get mangled very easily. So you're pretty much left with wheels if you want any cargo capacity. That's what the industry has stuck with.

I think that yes, FIRST does limit some creativity in terms of what can be done for bots on the field, but I also think that it helps us prepare for jobs in engineering in the "real world". However, don't let that stop anyone from trying to innovate!