[ALIBI]

There are times when a robot that can extend over 80" should be allowed on a field. If a robot has one manipulator on the front that does "A" and one manipulator on the rear that does "B", while doing "A" it extends to 79" to the front, while doing "B" it extends to 79" to the rear, if it does "A" and "B" simultainiously it extends to 120". If while on the field it does "A" and "B" at the same time it would be given a penalty. In this case it would be clear and obvious that we broke the rules.

I do have trouble when a single manipulator can extend more than 80" off the field, such as, if our graber is all the way open and our arm is fully extended forward, we could exceed 80", we will never do that on the field, though. I think that asking the refs. to watch for something that could happen in a fraction of a second like this is pushing the envelope a little bit too hard. The least that should be done is a demonstration to the inspectors that while it looks like we can do that, our hard stops and programing will not let us. We have an engineering solution that solves it rather than an engineering solution that we hope to get away with.

The kids I work with have taken great pains and scraped many good ideas to make sure that when they sign the inspection sheet, they know that their robot will not break any of the rules unless it is by pure oversite, and if they find out that they have, they would take the necessary actions to correct it before they ever run in a qualification match.