Ruling on Robonauts Balance

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

The same way engineers do when given design specifications. The English language is imprecise, but "can't grab, grasp, or grapple" is at least highly indicative of the customer's design specs. If an engineer comes up with a solution that can be argued to not grab, grasp, or grapple, and yet it can be argued to do so as well, they'd better be prepared to suck up the opportunity cost of having designed/built that mechanism, because the customer might reject it.

The thing is, in a real engineering situation, you hope to have a sufficient level of communication with the customer in advance of, and during the design process.

And if you don't have that level of communication, maybe you should bid/bill more, to cover the risk.

That's where the analogy to ordinary engineering falls apart: there's no meaningful way to compensate for unclear specifications, so FIRST has a higher duty to get them right in the first place.