New Perimeter Rules Reflection

[vhcook]

As an inspector, I liked the perimeter rule. I didn't have any teams have to make a correction, unlike the old problem where the frame going off square made the robot not fit the box anymore. The tape measure was a little more annoying to manipulate than the box, but I think it's better for the teams.

Originally Posted by bardd

Because of that, fitting mechanisms into the robot was much harder, and demanded more tradeoffs. Because of that we saw much less robots perform many tasks, and none could do all (the closest was 469 IMO that could do anything except climb and dump).

Did you see 1986? Floor pickup, 7 disc auton, rapid cycling, 30 point climb. Ok, they didn't dump once they were up there, but come on...

There were some other robots that could do nearly everything but I'll admit they were relatively rare. I don't think the reason for that was space. The tasks were not easy, and teams made strategic design choices to stay within their ability to execute well. A little more space might have gotten you a handful more teams that could do it all, but I don't think it would have made that big a difference. Larger might even have made climbing harder by moving the typical robot's center of gravity farther from the pyramid.

I'll admit we felt a bit of a crunch fitting in electrical and the pneumatics due to the space limitations, which was made even harder due to the design choice to go short, but we'd already decided we weren't climbing for more than 10 before we even started space allocation.