[darist]

As I've been reading through the ideas posted, I realize that it may be important to consider an important question:

Who is most likely to benefit from such a standard?
I see two sets of teams that will benefit most from this:

- Rookie teams or teams that don't have a chance to build a minibot because they don't have time or easy access to an FTC team or FTC parts. Those teams can benefit by implementing a deployment mechanism that complies with the standard. Let's make the standard as simple and quick to implement as possible so teams that run out of time can still do it, even if it is during the practice day.

- Teams that design a cool minibot, or several minibots and want to share them with other teams in their alliance, or any other teams for coopertition points or just to be nice. When designing the minibot such teams may want to have maximum flexibility to make the shape of their minibot whatever they want, but will be able to use their minibots in other hostbots if their minibots are compatible with the standard.

The teams that make the really cool minibots can have their own custom (non -standard compliant) deployment mechanism in their hostbot, optimized for their minibot. But if they also design their minibot to be compatible, they will have the ability to have their minibot go in other hostbots.

With this in mind, maybe the standard should be just for the deployment mechanism not for the minibot (or really just the part of the deployment mechanism that holds the minibot). That is, let's define a standard minibot "holder thingy" (along the lines of James' suggestion above), and any team can design a compatible minibot.