[Bongle]

I think they're great. As a part of a team that played almost entirely defensively, we're obviously great fans. At our first regional, the front bar on our robot was bent quite badly from all the pushing we did. We also had a few instances where we rode up or under other robots, which is obviously no good. Once we installed bumpers, I'm pretty sure we never ended up on top of or below another robot.


Here's why I like bumpers
-Bumpers are not a slippery slope towards robot-fighting. They simply increase the degree of interaction between robots that already existed. Aggresive, robot-damaging strategies were still banned and penalized just like all the years in the past.
-Bumpers aren't new. The only new thing is that FIRST finally released a standard for them so that they would actually bump into each other, and thus actually be effective bumpers.
-High-speed ramming still draws a penalty on the offending team. If you get high-speed rammed and there is no penalty, pester the field officials, because they really should be looking out for these things.
-You are given a weight and space allowance for building the standard bumpers.
-If both rammer and rammee have bumpers, the rammer faces approximately the exact risks as your robot.
-Incidental damage to all robots is reduced. There will always be times due to driver error where robots collide with each other or the wall at high speeds. Foam absorbs such impacts much better than steel, aluminum, or plastic. Teams should use their bumper allowance for this reason alone.

The main anti-bumper argument I see (and agree with) is that the anti-ramming rules are not enforced strongly enough to keep things from degrading. If they could maybe get a single specialized ref on the lookout for high-speed rams, that might solve that problem.

As soon as we realized our prime strategy was defense, our driver was given very specific orders to not ram. We have several instances on video where he would approach a robot at full throttle, then stop so hard the robot nearly tips over. Once stopped, he would approach the other robot slowly, then being pushing.