With the rules recently updated for this year's competition, and with the robot being at Charlie's house, we spent some time looking for loopholes. flaws in the system that would allow us to score MAXIMUM POINTS right under the judges' noses..
We were particularly intrigued by the concept of a "trailer".
According to the rules, trailers are different from attachments. An attachment has to fit inside a space (not much bigger than the robot), but trailers could be any size attached any way.
We're not exactly sure when something stops being an attachment and starts being a trailer, but this sounds like a good place to start looking for loopholes.
For example: what if we made a trailer that was 1.5 metres square and 40cm high, placed directly over the arena, and attached it to our robot by a long string? Technically it's a "trailer" because (a) it doesn't move under its own power, and (b) it is attached to the main robot, which never drives far enough away to "tow" it, but it could if it wanted to.
Then, the robot drives around underneath its own "trailer" and triggers events, like dumping cattle feed into the troughs directly below it with carefully positioned bags of feed.
We like this plan.
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