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You can go to Small Parts and purchase an assortment of various sized holes to place on your robot for weight reduction. They are expensive - only the very rich teams can afford them - but it is convenient to be able to move the holes around until you get them just right. We had a box of them around, but unfortunately I mixed up all the sizes in one box and the little ones fell through the big hole and I never found them again.
We tried running the compressor on helium, but the robot had such a squeaky little voice we couldn't stand it.
Permanent magnets are allowed in any amount. You could try aligning their fields against the earth's magentic field to generate some lift. Of course, your 'bot will have to be able to handle directional derivatives, and convolution integrals aren't on the additional hardware list. You might be better off working in the frequency domain.
Next year Exide is coming out with a battery that uses massless neutrinos. Getting rid of that heavy box full of electrons will be a big help - just not this year.
There may be a topological way out, though. If you start with a two-dimensional Moebius strip, and move up to the three-dimensional Klein Bottle, there should be some way to take the next step to a four-dimensional construct (let's call it a "Kamen Manifold") that would get rid of the mass entirely. Then you can work with all kinds of neat things, like PVC pipe with an OD smaller than the ID so that the inside is on the outside.
By the way, how strictly do you think the ref's are going to enforce L'Hopital's Rule this year? I mean, you have to set SOME limits...............
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Leo M.
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