[Cory]

You can bring a practice robot to the competition, you just can't use parts from it. Let's say that the real robot is in bad mechanical shape, so the pit crew is frantically working to make the components perform properly. Meanwhile, the programmers could be working on autonomous mode, or any kind of programming, and debugging everything on there, so that when the real thing is "done" they know what exactly they need to do to get it to 100%

Cory