Rebuild

[eugenebrooks]

There is an important fine point here. You can take a mechanism
home for repair/upgrade, but you may only bring parts (subject to
the 25 pound limit for all of your fabricated parts) back to the event.
The mechanism that you might have repaired/upgraded must be
brought to your next event as parts, and then assembled in the pit
at the event.

Eugene

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Besides what is shipped in the robot crate, you may bring only 25 pounds of fabricated robot components and/or mechanisms to a competition. You may not use flames (no welding torches) or create sparks (no grinding wheels) in the pit. You may not work on the robot before the pits open or after they close. You may not remove the robot from the venue. That's about it for restrictions.

Bring as much raw material as you want. Bring all the portable tools you want. Bring blueprints, assembly drawings, jigs, templates, etc. You can rebuild your robot completely if you have enough time.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

It wouldn't be a Midwest Regional without a certain un-named team, rebuilding their robot on Thursday after a post ship, planning session that changes their strategy.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

It wouldn't be a Midwest Regional without a certain un-named team, rebuilding their robot on Thursday after a post ship, planning session that changes their strategy.

nor would it be a midwest regional if that certain team didn't face 111 sometime in the elims.

As for rebuilding, it's been done before, by lots of teams. Just keep it within rules.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by eugenebrooks

There is an important fine point here. You can take a mechanism
home for repair/upgrade, but you may only bring parts (subject to
the 25 pound limit for all of your fabricated parts) back to the event.
The mechanism that you might have repaired/upgraded must be
brought to your next event as parts, and then assembled in the pit
at the event.

Eugene

Eugene,

That was the case in years past, but I think the definitions in the rules this year make it pretty clear that you can bring in pre-assembled mechanisms as spare, replacement, or upgrade parts.

[mathking]

We did this a couple of years ago at the Championships. A near fatal design flaw revealed itself at Buckeye and we had a robot that could do four things poorly and nothing well after a bad impact. So we decided that doing three things well was better. As several people have said, the key is having a good plan. We went over the plan a couple of times to make sure that we had thought of (almost) everything. We made sure we had all the parts we needed. And we had someone in charge of each part of the process. One of the important things was to manage how we would all interact with the robot. When you are all trying to work in the robot at once, you get in each others' way all the time. Good luck.

[eugenebrooks]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Eugene,

That was the case in years past, but I think the definitions in the rules this year make it pretty clear that you can bring in pre-assembled mechanisms as spare, replacement, or upgrade parts.

"REPLACEMENT PARTS – A COMPONENT or MECHANISM"

"REPLACEMENT PARTS – A COMPONENT or MECHANISM"

I stand corrected...

[Qbranch]

Sure... we did this at BMR in 2006. We shipped a loosely connected bunch of parts that was built into a robot in the first half of thursday.

-q

[David Brinza]

I was a part of the Team 4 One-day Wonder experience in the 2006 GTR where our competition robot did not arrive until Friday from the Los Angeles Regional the prior week. We got a tremendous amount of help from many teams there (45, 188, 217, 1310, 1398, and others) to build an entire robot on Thursday and competed with it on Friday. A team that chooses to rebuild their own robot shouldn't expect that kind of support at a regional.

In Atlanta that same year, the Team 4 students decided to rebuild the competition robot and barely managed to get it done. But the robot didn't move at all in the first match and performed poorly until about the fourth match. By that time, the damage was done and Team 4 did not get selected for the elimination round.

So, there's nothing in the rules against rebuilding a robot, but it might be less than a wonderful experience. I'd stick to minor upgrades and giving the drive team more practice opportunities on Thursday. There's an addage in FIRST: "A good driver will beat a better robot".