Uniform rules and enforcers?

[Ben Mitchell]

Originally posted by KenWittlief
you need to keep in mind that the purpose of the competition isnt to see which team can build the best robot

the teams have just gone through a complete engineering design cycle, and now they have their product on hand

and want to see how it performs

so rejecting a teams robot for some technicality effectively would reject ALL the work they did for the last 6 weeks.

I disagree with you here: the entire point of having a competition is to see who has built the best robot, and uses their robot with a strategy to win the game.

Rejecting a team due to a technicality WOULD nullify thier machine until it is fixed. That's the point. What's the point of having restricted parts or rules at all if teams could use whatever they wanted and still compete?

The idea of inspectors is to ensure that all the teams competing have valid machines, in order to even the playing field and make sure everyone is following the rules.

Like testing atheletes for steriods.

To use your example: If a company spent 6 weeks working on a product, say a new kind of light switch, and put it on the market without realizing that it cannot be used due to eletrical codes in some states - they lose.

The rules are availible to all, and there is no reason why teams cannot follow them.