[Matt Leese]

I would think that whatever the intent of the rule, it will "level the playing field" quite a bit. Simply, there was a huge advantage for the autonomous portion of competition if you built a second non-competition robot. You could spend all the inbetween portion finalizing your code on the second robot.

That said, I think that to be fair, and analogous with the mechanical portion of the robot, that the only thing that can be developed outside of the legal build periods would be design documents. It'd be legal to develop a state machine or flow chart. It'd be illegal to actually write the code to implement it. And if you wrote proof of concept code, I'd think you'd have to leave it at home and rewrite it from scratch at the actual competition.

Matt