[BBnum3]

This is for all those who read my earlier post and had any thoughts or comments on my team's bumper design.

Please don't worry. We didn't cheat. It was because of my lousy writing that I gave that impression.

I completely understand the outrage felt by many at my misrepresentation of the facts. If I read that post I would have thought that a team was proud of cheating and would've felt the same way. The way I clumsily wrote, it sounded like I said that we deliberately broke a rule in order to gain an advantage for our robot. We didn't. I want to relay the whole story of how my team arrived at our bumper design, because I feel that it is necessary that I clear up this whole issue.

Here's the story:

One of our mentors decided to cut the bumpers with a cut that ended up not being perfectly vertical. With the Cordura fabric wrapping the cut, the bumpers looked vertical to all of us, and apparently the inspectors thought so, too. There was no intentional deception. Our robot passed inspection with those cuts on the bumpers. I thought that if our robot passed inspection with those bumpers that they could not possibly be illegal. After this my team pretty much forgot any issue with our bumpers. At the Championship event our team again passed inspection with the same bumpers. The topic of bumpers never once came up at the Championship, no mention (as far as i know) by any inspectors or any other teams.

I'm not that great of a writer. I was trying to go too fast in my original post, and disgraced myself and my team. When I said we knew and had read the rule I was wrong. The whole issue with cheating is entirely due to my poor wording, and not to anything my teammates did. I feel really bad about this whole thing, and hope that I can learn from this experience, because, plain and simple, I did something stupid.