[Tristan Lall]

Time to jump in here and offer the officials' perspective on the matter.¹ I was the lead inspector at Waterloo, and personally approved the modification.

The modification involved removing the shooter mechanism, and substituting a large, heavy object, in order to restore the lost weight. This was done in order to reduce the height of the centre of gravity, to permit the robot to perform better in a defensive capacity. It was performed just prior to the elimination rounds, and was appropriately re-inspected.

As for the rules, first of all, the 25 pound rule (<R29>) applies to fabricated parts only; by contrast, the large weight (the vises were removed in the final configuration) are COTS items, and therefore do not violate <R29>.

Teams are allowed and expected to make modifications at the competition site—this much is unquestionable. <R09> requires that the components that constitute all configurations of the robot be weighed together. It was decided that since the weight and vise were not brought to the competition site as robot parts, it could not have been reasonably determined that they represented additional robot configurations at the time of the original inspection.² In order to continue to satisfy <R09>, the (removed) shooter must cease to be a possible alternate configuration (or be brought under the weight limit by some other means)—this was accomplished by informing the team that they could not put the shooter back on at this event.

Basically, it's just like Cory and Derek explained. 1281's modification was legal at Waterloo.

There's also an additional complexity to the problem. The team is now unquestionably aware of the added-weight strategy, and has configured their robot to accept these parts. Since I believe that the team intends to replace the shooter at the competition (and remove the weights), they will have to choose between one or the other, next Thursday, when they are once again inspected. The configurations which they choose to abandon will become illegal for further use (but note that if subsets of both devices are used, they may still be legal after re-inspection). Confusingly, the rules don't necessarily preclude them from finding another 40 pounds of dead weight, and doing the same thing with new parts. It will fall upon the GTR lead inspector to make the determination of the team's intentions—and this isn't easy, given the fact that while plausible deniability is very much reduced the second time around, a second such modification could, in theory, be the result of honest improvisation. We (meaning a representative from 1281, Doug Hink—the lead inspector at GTR, and I) should probably discuss this next Thursday....

Also, as a historical note, I permitted 1241 (i.e. distinct from 1281) to make a similar modification last year (with a single COTS bench vise), on similar grounds. I'm quite sure that 1281 and their alliance were aware of this past ruling when they made the decision to add the weights.

¹ This post is not to be construed as an official ruling.

² It's not reasonable for an inspection to cover every possible item that a team could manage to attach to their robot (when we're talking dead weight, anything's possible). As a practical matter, the must inspectors attempt to decide whether a team intended to keep these extra parts on hand in order to configure their robot differently, or if it was just an impromptu change.