Ok, a picture thread before, had US (TEAM 549), questioning the 6 inch rule on how we were going to solve our problem. In this pic here we have clearly solved the 6 inch length rule, the fron of our robot has two sides that are 3 inches in length. The SIDE bumper is 3.5 inches in width when built with the required hardware. With this extra width we can easilt make the six in length requirement. YES, this is using the plywood/noodles/starps, and what ever else we need to build the bumpers…
let me know what you think.
YES the bumpers look bad here, but I just wanted to show you guys how we were going to solve the problem. They are just tapped up with some duct tape for vusual purposes along with a scale.
The rules are pretty hard to understand, but the Q&A is hard to understand as well. The only part of the bumpers that will be counted tward length will be the cross sections that have all elements (plywood, cloth, noodle, aluminum angle) that means the 3 inches which stick off the edges (because they do not have plywood on them) do not count. I will post the Q&A accordingly when I find it. We spent a whole day trying to figure out if this was legal, but between the multiple answers on Q&A over this subject, the reality is pretty clear.
EDIT 1: you cannot bring plywood outside your frame, or even into the corner. reread <R08> I can’t rembmer which clause but i think its M (there is a diagram on the second page of <R08> explaining what I mean.
Actually, while there are several rules covering bumpers, the GDC pro-actively took the step of addressing how these rules would affect design in Team Update #2 published wayyy back in early January.
Look at the last page and you will see that no robot can have an opening greater than 26" across, and “long and narrow” robots are limited to 16" across. Time to take out the TIG and reduce the opening a bit… should be easy enough to do… but do I detect the frame narrowing towards the rear of the robot? That might be an area for bumper concern, too… hard to tell from this angle.
Even if you did wrap “soft parts” around the corner, the GDC has been quite clear in saying that you still need at least 6 inches of “hard parts” behind the bumpers on each side of the corner. That’s what “protect” in <R08>I is supposed to mean.
