[EricH]

At one of 330's demos, we allowed team related people to drive (particularly since most of our drive team wasn't there ). The thing was that someone who knew the controls was always next to them operating the other function. Plus the crowd was held back, and there was a ditch to go through to get to them, and there were goals all over, so you couldn't do much damage. My mom drove for a few minutes with me on the arm, then we switched, but I was always within easy grab of the disable switch.

As for robot design, design it to last for at least one more competition than you are going to and make it easy to repair, and you should be fine. If you design it to withstand at least two years of competition, you will be fine and have a practice bot for next year.