Are the mandatory bumpers helping or hurting?

[Katy]

As I am sure you all have noticed a specific build of bumpers are mandatory this year.

I would like to find out how many people here believe these bumpers are improving design and gameplay, increasing the spectator enjoyment of the game, preventing damage to robots or field components, preventing intentional tipping, making running a regional easier, or contributing to the events in another way I have not thought of.

Personally I do not believe bumpers are assisting the league at all.

From a spectator perspective they make the robots look more uniform. This I do not believe is a positive aspect because it makes it harder to tell simple box-like robots apart.

Bumpers do not improve design and gameplay. The 2/3rds covered rule means that generally objects can only be taken in from one side of the robot. This severely limits the design constraints and also forces the robots to become far more uniform.

Bumpers in practice do not prevent damage to robots. If for no other reason these bumpers add an additional 15 pounds of mass to the robot that now will ram full speed into other surfaces. Additionally, the bumpers appear to be giving a false sense of security to the drivers. After attending regionals (both in person and via webcast) it appears that drivers are driving more aggressively because they believe that bumpers will protect them and the field components. I know a team whose kitbot chassis was snapped by one of these aggressive drivers through both sets of bumpers. That is an incredible amount of force.

Damage situations to the field appear even worse because while other robots may have bumpers on them, the field components do not. This means that drivers can now ram rather hard into field walls without fearing damage to their robot but that the field walls may still sustain damage. Padding the walls would add weight that must be shipped from regional to regional, setup and takedown time and complexity, and make the overfall field far more expensive. I do not believe that is the solution to this problem.

Mandatory bumpers do not assist with preventing tipping.

In terms of physics mandatory bumpers should assist with intentional tipping a little bit but this is in reality a disservice to the students. The reason bumpers help is not because they prevent wedged-shaped robots particularly effectively. True wedged-shaped robots are few and far between. When was the last time you saw a robot that tipped another robot by getting under it? Instead most tipping happens by hitting a robot hard when it is most sensitive to a hit, for example while turning, reaching up high or descending a slope. Instead the additional fifteen pounds of mass is lowering the center of gravity of the robots and making them physically harder to tip. This is a disservice to the students because it is watering down one of the fundamental engineering challenges of building a good robot. Giving the students a false sense of a "rule of thumb" of "will that work" for center of gravity will only hurt them later and damage their ability to build future real-life solutions to complex problems.

Additionally, despite the physics, there is the fact that despite the extra fifteen pounds of mass to help out the CG a tremendous number of robots still wind up on their sides by the end of the match. This is probably because drivers are driving more aggressively and hitting harder.

Bumpers are an additional hassle to running a regional. Having bumpers adds time to the robot inspection process. This would be easier if they did not have to be weighed separately because then the problem could be solved with more volunteer inspectors. Instead, since there is generally only one scale at a regional it puts additional weight in what is already a bottleneck in the robot inspection process.

In short I do not not believe the mandatory bumpers are doing their job in preventing damage to the robot, other robots, or field components. Additionally they have many other negative effects. I am eager to hear other people's opinions on this topic.