Quote:
Originally Posted by Tristan Lall
Things like supporting the entire backing of the bumper are not helpful. If a bumper breaks, who cares? It's a bumper. Either fix it with some sort of gusset, or cut it and call it two bumpers. The rules should be written to permit a simple, effective resolution to a broken bumper, instead of imposing a basically-worthless constraint on everyone—which, due to the phrasing, affects teams even if there's no reasonable chance that their bumpers will break. During inspections at three events, I saw two teams with essentially unsupported bumpers along two sides (including one at the Championship...). They were forced to add structure to support the backing of their bumpers—even though, in all likelihood, the bumper backing itself was much stronger than the structure. By contrast, I saw more than a dozen teams that had small gaps behind their bumpers which were technically illegal, but which posed no real problem from an engineering perspective. And yet, the rule is clear: they must support the entire length of each bumper with the robot's structure or frame. So mounting points were adjusted, or bumpers shimmed. This wasted a lot of time, both for teams and inspectors. But basically: this constraint is useless, and even counterproductive—either get rid of it, or write in a clause that specifically allows inspectors to override it based on their engineering judgment.
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I agree.
We usually run the west coast drive, a system that is extremely minimal and elegant in construction. The fact that we had to do
this in 2009 to fully support the bumpers is silly to me, we could've supported them at a few places and be done with it. That doubled the amount of welding and parts in our frame, along with adding a pound of useless weight and making the frame ugly.
It's a little insulting for FIRST to say, hey, we don't trust you to build a frame right, so here are bumpers. I can live with that, but when FIRST says we further don't trust you enough to put bumpers on there without them breaking, so you MUST support them the entire length, that's just ridiculous.