Cheesecake robot. How far is too far?

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by MaGiC_PiKaChU

Hello CD. I was thinking about it with a friend, and we consider building an entire robot at an event to give away as cheesecake to our 3rd alliance member. This seems entirely within the rules. The robot would be able to drive around. Is it too far? How would you feel competing with a robot you did not build? Opinions?

I know the manual is pretty long, and that sometimes people don't read ALL the way through, but... um... R1 is pretty close to the beginning:

R1 A Team must submit their ROBOT for Inspection. The ROBOT must be an electromechanical assembly built by the FIRST Robotics Competition Team to perform specific tasks when competing in FIRST STRONGHOLD. The ROBOT must include all of the basic systems required to be an active participant in the game – power, communications, control, BUMPERS, and movement. The ROBOT implementation must obviously follow a design approach intended to play FIRST STRONGHOLD (e.g. a box of unassembled parts placed on the FIELD, or a ROBOT designed to play a different game does not satisfy this definition).

R1 requires that the ROBOT a Team uses in competition was built by
that Team, but isn’t intended to prohibit assistance from other Teams
(e.g. fabricating elements, supporting construction, writing software,
developing game strategy, contributing COMPONENTS and/or
MECHANISMS, etc.).

Emphasis mine. Feel free to give away whatever you want, but maybe read at least one of the rules before suggesting your strategy is "entirely within the rules".

Sorry if that seems a bit snarky... some FRC rules can be difficult to figure out, or hard to notice. But they were pretty clear about this one...

Jason