No Bag and Tag Inspection at Championship

[Ed Sparks]

I've been inspecting for far too long and have seen so many things show up at CMP that were just not acceptable. I'm not talking about insignificant things that don't make a hill of beans difference, but things that clearly give an advantage or just aren't safe.

How would you feel as a competitor if a robot or robots won the CMP with a device that clearly violated the intent of the rules and gave them a clear advantage? I suspect after so much work & effort on your part to field a legal competitive robot, you would be agitated. How would you feel if a robot caught fire on the field because a battery ruptured or shorted? How would you feel if, God forbid, some stored energy mechanism released during setup and a kid got hurt?

Inspection, to me, is as much about keeping us all in the same "sandbox" as far as the equipment we compete with. I'm not saying that teams set out to cheat, they just get real creative on rule intent and push the line too far sometimes or worse, they don't think the rules are all that necessary to read. As a competitor, I want to win fair and square and if my team doesn't win, I don't want to see that it may have been because the winning team gained advantage by not following some of the rules. Can you imagine NASCAR not inspecting the car's before a major race?

Last point ......... Too many robots get through regional/division inspections with issues. I wish we could get inspectors at these events with 6+ years of experience but that's not always happening. A new inspector just can't look at a robot like those of us with 18+ years experience and see the big ticket issues right away. The teams that get through to CMP need to know about the things that are wrong so that they are not destined to repeat these mistakes in the future.