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Originally Posted by dlavery
So far, everyone is takling their personal pet peeve and trying to find a way to make the rule associated with a certain topic/application/mechanism less restrictive. That is fine, and everyone is certainly entitled to riding their own hobby horse. But I think that folks are headed in the wrong direction. I think that we should look for potential rules that can be made MORE restrictive, and scale back the "almost anything goes" philosophy that has become associated with the robot construction rules over the past several years. I believe that this philosophy has lead to a lot less true creativity and innovation in the robots, as teams have just gone out and bought solutions to design problems rather than creating solutions from a kit part that was never intended to do the job for which it would now be used. I would be all in favor of adding more restrictions back in to the robot construction rules to bring back some of the real creativity that every team displayed during the early years of FIRST.
For example, what about a rule that says "no threaded fasteners of any type are permitted on the robot."* If it were up to me, I would add a rule like that. Oh, wait, it is... 
-dave
* you think I am joking, don't you? hehhehheh |
Dave,
I have mixed feelings about this issue. Even though it was fun to be restricted to 20' of timing belt and spending countless hours coming up with ingenious mechanisms actuated only by latex tubing (a lot of them!) and those nice springs FIRST used to supply, I consider that the overall level of competition has been
significantly raised since FIRST relaxed the rules concerning materials and parts usage.
One could also argue that this occurred concomitantly with FIRST's efforts to provide teams reliable, quality, out of the box solutions - chassis and drive trains, basically.
Many threads have debated the Inspiration issued associated with those ready solutions, but I will not go deep into that.
I have a
feeling (emphasis on feeling - absolutely no "scientific" evidence) that students are more inspired by an amazing robot that is well designed and built (thanks to those "permissive" rules) than by a specific jaw-dropping mechanism devised in a glimpse of geniality.
Of course, that's a moot point when you come to Beatty, because they're (very!) consistent in presenting us with a robot that is all of that. 
Then again, I can be very wrong, and maybe that's an issue to be discussed in another thread.
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