Uniform rules and enforcers?

[Matt Leese]

Having inspected robots in the past, let me be the first to say that it's not a particularly easy job. You have to remember that there's one inspector for each robot which means that that one inspector has to know about all aspects of the robot. The two key parts of the inspection are the electronics and the pneumatics. Now, personally, I know the electronic rules quite well. I don't know the pneumatic rules that well at all. I did have some help with the pneumatic side of things (thanks ChrisH) but I'm sure there were some teams that managed to slip by with something slightly out of spec because I just didn't know enough about the pneumatics (and I'm sure the action was misadvertant and not intentional but mistakes happen). On the flip side of things, I know that I probably made some teams change some electrical things that most inspectors would let go through as it was incidental (I'm picky on my wiring).

All in all, it'd be quite hard to standardize things like inspection simply because there's so much variation among both people and teams.

Matt