Robot Ethics?

[Jherbie53]

For the sake of just using it for CAD drawings, taking an assembly and drawing it is right, as long as you put it back. As for when you should disassemble your robot for good, well thats going to be different for every team and should be in a different thread, which there might already be one.

[Jeff Waegelin]

If there is any way possible to keep a robot, keep it. I can't tell you how many times I've regretted disassembling an old robot. It always seems that as soon as you take a robot apart, the next year's game will require you to design a mechanism similar to the one you just destroyed. There are few better learning and teaching tools in FIRST than an old robot... so think carefully before you take one apart. You can always try to stash it in a team member's basement (or bedroom... someone on my team did that once), but if you take it apart because "we ran out of space"... it's gone forever.

[RoboMadi]

Your old robot is the main key to recruit more people to the team. Our team use it most of the time to advertise our team and spark interest among high schoolers for science and technology.
I'd like to mention that if you get a chance upgrade your robot to something interesting. Like our team made a basketball launcher and a mechanical knight out of our old robot. Its not dismantling it, but more like using it to learn new things and at the same time recruit more people out of it.
Its better to use it for something, then putting it away, while it rusts in a warehouse or anywhere else.