Are the mandatory bumpers helping or hurting?

[Jeff Pahl]

Originally Posted by Katy

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.

As an inspector, the bumpers are not a big deal. Weighing them does not slow the process down significantly, as long as the team is paying attention and has them ready to put on the scale. Having them on the robot during the rest of the inspection sometimes makes it hard to see the things we want to see, so I like having them off during the inspection.

The teams I have been involved with have used the bumpers every year they have been an option. Personally, I like them. They have saved us from a lot of damage, not only during matches, but during testing at the school and during demos, where walls and posts just seem to like to jump in front of the robot. Figuring out how to attach them so that they can be removed and installed quickly is part of the engineering challenge. This year 1379 used quick release hitch pins, and can remove / replace all the bumpers in less than a minute.

When I don't like the bumpers is when I have to help carry the robot on and off the field. 120# for the robot, 13# for the battery, 15# for the bumpers, and all of a sudden you are asking two people to pick up and move a 150 lb object that is pretty awkward to handle, and to do it quickly and safely.

One thing I noticed last year when inspecting at the Championships was that the robots that didn't use bumpers tended to be more beat up and had a lot more trouble at inspection fitting in the sizing box due to things being bent. I hope that there will be less of that this year due to everyone having bumpers.