Quote:
Originally Posted by squirrel
I seem to recall in the past few years there have been rules about ramming other robots, but this year not. Would you rather have mandatory bumpers, or refs deciding whether or not your driving was acceptable?
Also there was plenty of robot damage this year...the frame piece above the front ball harvester on many robots got bent repeatedly. Our plywood one suffered a crack at a regional, but the oak reinforcement added at champs held up fine.
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Yeah, our harvester was also damaged in one of our matches, though it managed to keep working. To be honest I'd rather have restrictions on driving. Allowing teams to build how they want at bumper zone level could lead to some interesting designs (like harvesting from all sides of the bot) and ramming isn't all the amusing to me at least.
That said, I think the worst part about the bumper rules this year was their strictness and inflexibility. The fact that there was the trailer hitch and the non-bumper covered areas surrounding it meant that, no matter what your design was, you lost some area on the front of the bot to bumpers as well. Last year we had no bumpers on the front of the bot and the sides were also somewhat short as we only had to have part of the robot covered.