[Al Skierkiewicz]

I am glad many of you are recognizing the problems faced by inspectors each year. Before any decisions are made in this area, we need to address several items of prime importance.
Each student should have the best experience they can have for that weekend. To accomplish that goal from the standpoint of the robot and inspectors the following needs to take place.
1. Regardless of the number of matches played, every match should contain a full complement of robots.
2. Every robot that plays needs to have no doubt as to it's compliance with the rules for every match, else wise doubt and conjecture creep into the minds of the participants.
3. Inspectors need to be known as fair and above reproach in order to accomplish #2.
It is for these reasons that robot inspections have been done all these years, by volunteers who are supervised by a trained lead. Sometimes those are team mentors like myself and sometime they are professionals who do not have a team but want to volunteer. But we do not inspect our own team's robot and I recommend to those other inspectors, we do not inspect close friends either in order to accomplish #2 above. (unfortunately for me that list grow larger every year.)
What makes it difficult for inspectors, even experienced ones, are the variations in robot design and implementation. Additionally, team dynamics and mentor participation play into this process as well.
Although many of the ideas presented are worthy of investigation, readers need to realize that there is a vast difference in the culture of our teams based on regions. Some regions are proud to be inspected by noon and others are just as proud to be inspected last thing on Thursday or early Friday. Some teams have one mentor and five students and others have 30 mentors and 60 students. One team may have several teams to turn to for help while others know very few. Some regionals contain highly motivated and supplied teams while others have what they can pack in the car or pick up locally and that usually means no power tools, no spares and no hardware. Ask your friendly neighborhood inspector how many times they have inspected a team that was too big for the box by more than a 1/4 inch. Those teams have a lot of work to do in order to become compliant. I hear some snickers out there, but all of us have stories like this one. I had a team last year that was two inches over size in each direction. They were a poor team with no engineering mentors, just involved parents. They had been using a borrowed tape measure with two inches cut off without knowing it. Even experienced teams fall into a year where the entire mentor staff changes. When that occurs, the team is like a rookie. I wish I had a nickel for every team that thought the chassis was precut to the right size.
Until we address these types of issues to make every team confidant that we have a level playing field, until we insure every student, and especially rookies, have a quality experience, we are merely making our own lives easier and not improving anything.
Please continue to make suggestions, inspectors are reading your posts.