[Mike Betts]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Best or easiest? I'd go with easiest for bumpers any day.

Our team attached our four bumpers together with angle brackets to make one large bumper and then had corner plates that laid horizontal to the top of the robot frame and attached to the robot with wing nuts. Took 2-4 students around 20-30 seconds to install.

Brendan, Marc, et al,

First of all, let me apologize for the length of this post. It is not my intention to rub salt into a wound but rather to give some insight into a process that sometimes appears arbitrary by the field soldiers…

Unfortunately, the one piece bumper design you advocate was ruled illegal last year by the GDC (Official Q&A post: http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?p=39030).

Prior to that post, not only did I consider a one piece bumper legal, but I told many teams to add corner braces to increase support for non-orthogonal bumper impacts during my courtesy inspections at a local pre-ship scrimmage in February (I was Lead Inspector at two Regionals last year).

After that Q&A post this subject was debated by other LRIs on a weekly conference call.

I even made a behind the scenes appeal to the GDC via the Deputy FRC Director. I persuaded him to advocate our (mine and a few other LRIs) position with reasons why corner supports should be considered both desirable and legal along with some illusory drawings (one in attached). His reply was as follows:

I spoke to the GDC last night. They have determined this is illegal under the current rules. One element of R07 is that the bumpers must be constructed as illustrated in Figure 8-1 (last sentence of the first paragraph). The only fasteners shown in 8-1 are aluminum angle used in attaching the fabric, and a fastening system allowing attachment to the robot.

R07-N also enumerates the hard parts of the bumper as being the two fasteners above as well as the plywood. No allowance is made for other types of fasteners. I wouldn't say that a team using this corner fastener is violating this element of the rules, because it really deals with something else, but this is additional evidence that only the two types of fasteners were intended to be allowed on the bumper.

This is one of those situations where a reasonable person could make a case that corner fastener approach to connecting bumpers should be allowed, because it strengthens to the bumpers themselves and could make installation and removal easier. However, we must enforce the rules as written, at every regional, to ensure fairness.

The bumper rules are always difficult to write. The GDC looks at lessons learned from prior years when generating rules for the current game. The corner fastener question is an example of the type of information they will often consider when formulating new rules.

I imagine that this design nuance eluded many teams and I imagine that many inspectors missed enforcement as it was pretty far down on our priority list (namely, get the teams on the field fairly and safely).

Regardless, it could be misleading and/or detrimental to teams, looking to his forum for guidance, to advocate corner bracing on bumpers… At least until the 2011 rules come out (I hope).

JMHO.

Mike