[BillP]

I think that the ref's at Nationals did an excellent job of addressing this whole issue at the driver's meeting before the competition. They stressed that "ramp-bot" drivers need to be very careful because they would be scrutinizing very carefully the actions of any robot with sloped sides. Their basic opinion was that sloped sides are not (currently) against the rules, but intentionally tipping another robot was. Because of this, the seemingly innocent actions of a slope-sided robot could easily be interpreted along the same lines as ramming or pushing high on another robot.

There were several excellent robots with sloped sides in Archimedes (980 comes to mind), that never had any problems because of the skill and care of their drivers. In a nutshell, the ref's defused the entire situation before it even started.

OK, now to answer the question: There should be no rules limiting the slope on the sides or robots (IMHO).