"Spare Parts" Rules Are Broken

[Matt Adams]

Preface: I truly believe that one has to be VERY VERY careful before posting something like what I am going to post, but I think that what I saw this weekend at the Great Lakes Regional gives me little choice. There needs to be some very drastic changes in FIRST's rules about "spare parts."

There were a number of teams that brought their "practice robot" to the GLR. Personally, I think this is a smart move. Since your practice robot and your competition robot should be identical, it's great to have EVERY SINGLE spare part with you and available at a competition. For the teams that decide to invest the additional manpower and resources into such an endeavor, the benefits are VERY significant. The fear of missing a round due to not having a spare part available takes a great deal of stress off during the competition. [Edit]However, it should be noted, that this is NOT ALLOWED PER RULE R09[/Edit]

What I found to be absolutely frustrating, terribly ungracious, and incredibly heartbreaking is the teams that brought in their "practice robot" which was actually a SIGNIFICANTLY UPGRADED machine and replaced ENTIRE MECHANISMS on their "competition robot".

I consider myself to be rather lenient on a lot of rules. If you didn't have time to get some cool colored Lexan sides before your robot shipped, and brought those along and swapped them out, which I saw a few teams do, I have NO problem with that. If you even brought powder-coated parts that were identical to those on your robot, I turned a blind eye. Honestly, if you had a part that you even wanted to "tweak" because, it just wasn't working right by the time you shipped, I'll get over it.

However, there were teams that had non-functional robots, who brought in their "practice" robot's assemblies, and suddenly had a not only fully functional robot, but one with an additional 2 weeks of upgrades.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I think that there's only one way to ensure the fairness to all competitors, by adding the following rule:

• You must ship all spare parts with your robot, and you are responsible for the associated additional shipping charges. You may only bring in raw and "off the shelf" materials to the competitions.

FIRST counts on teams to be gracious and professional, but from what I saw at the Great Lakes Regional, I was truly discouraged. There's no way to fully monitor the "spare parts" system that is in place now, and teams, both well respected veterans, and newer teams, are blatantly cheating.

I understand that teams with a well thought-out game plan can get a non-functional robot up and running with a whole Thursday of hard work- I saw this happen. A lot of teams bring in raw materials and finished the last touches (or even the main functions!). Congratulations to them for quick work! However, let me ensure you that this was not the case for a number of teams.

While perhaps it's too late to make changes now - I firmly believe there needs to be a complete overhaul of the spare parts system for next season to ensure fairness for all teams.

I plead that we remember six weeks is six weeks.

Matt