|
As mentioned by a few: inspections
From what I've seen (which honestly isn't much) the inspections vary greatly between regionals. To expand on the oddities of the MMR inspection Katie brought up, the inspector made our team power up the robot and show him the team number without thethering (blatant violation of FIRST rules). He also told our team that once we weighed in we could make major changes without weighing in again (note: despite the bogus ruling we did not make any weight altering changes).
As a member of the inspector team at SoCal, we found some rules violations that others missed at earlier regionals. Previous inspectors allowed velcro on stay-home devices which rule M11 disallows (we had to look it up). We made all teams file down their sharp edges and tie down their loose wires (despite the groaning from some teams). Most teams appreciated the thorough inspection, a few even thanked us.
To answer Martin's question, clamping the field is illegal and should be a DQ. I don't have my rule book in front of me now (shame on me!) so I can't point to the official ruling. But I remember our team discussing this since we have a hook on the side of our robot. We had to train our drivers to be sure to not hook the side rail. At SoCal a robot hooked the rail and the drivers unhooked it within 5 secs; the refs looked at each other but didn't make any call.
Mike
|