[daltore]

Weight isn't to be blindly removed as a trophy piece, it should be carefully considered as to what it would affect. Sure, having a light-weight robot is very good most of the time, but under specific circumstances, it can be iffy. Last year, our robot weighed in at 99.1 pounds (without battery and bumpers). However, this was a 13-foot max height forklift, and it's center of gravity was actually fairly high with the lift lowered. In a practice match, 118 ran into us when we were putting the ball on the overpass and we went down, and on competition day in our second match, 118 just barely pulled us over when they got hooked on our arm early in the match. Then we added 4 steel bars about an inch from the ground and ended up at 119.1, dead on 20 pounds. Now they'd probably be the ones flopped over.

Weight is a structural property, and just like any other structural property, it can be used to help or hurt the robot.

But also consider if we'd had exactly 21 pounds of bars. To put that in perspective, that's a medium Red Bull away from being disqualified until another 20 minutes of work could be done, by which time we could have completely missed a match. Doing careful consideration on the generalized weight and weight distribution of your robot can really save you sometimes.