For this year’s college competition, Robot A must be under 24"x24"x24" and Robot B must be under 15"x15"x15". Will there be a new sizing tool to reflect this year’s change?
tape measure 
I’m going to make my robot really oddly shaped just to screw with the inspectors.
“this your robot?”
“yep”
“what’s that weird glowy thing in the middle there?”
“werllll, we kinda sorta linked it to a pocket dimension through a singularity. please don’t touch i-”
shoop
“well, there goes my pen. is it still within a 15” cube?"
“yes miss”
flips through clipboard"well the VEX notebook doesn’t ever say you can’t harness multiple universes, so I guess you’re in the clear. we will not be giving you any warnings for breakdowns of causality, understand?"
“yep!”
“Bigger on the inside than the outside…ingenious. now then, what about your other robot? Is it within a 24” cube?"
“technically.”
“technically?”
unfurls sheet “it only exists in two dimensions, you see-”
As someone who has volunteered doing inspections - when inspectors say this, it really doesn’t mean anything. The inspectors (obviously) don’t meet up with the refs and say “watch out for 1234X, make sure to DQ them if their not-quite-legal zip ties affect the outcome of a match”.
It’s more of a cop-out way of saying either “I’ll pass you, but that’s technically illegal” or “I’ll pass you, but I suspect you’re planning to break the rules”.
The other lazy inspector thing I did (and saw others doing) is telling teams to fix small infractions but secretly passing them on that checklist item. “Robot uses no packaging”? Ok, tick. “Replace that twist tie with a zip tie”. No, no one will ever check to see that you actually did.
Out of all my blathering, it’s interesting that you latched on to that one statement. Is that a point of contention for your team?
No, it’s just something that’s intersting to see from the other side of the fence. For teams, a competition (and Worlds especially) is something they’ve prepared for months for where every little bit counts.
For volunteers, it’s somthing they signed up to help out with for a morning or a couple of days. Volunteers get a lot of autonomy and relatively little training. My guess is that this is because the top priority is, and should be, to keep them happy so they volunteer again - as well as a simple lack of resources to train and supervise more intensively. Things definitely aren’t treated with the same level of gravity by volunteers as they are by teams.
So while new teams might be intimidated by what the inspector said in your little story, it’s really just something she heard the slightly more experienced inspector beside her say ten minutes ago and she thought it might encourage them to behave themselves.
generic rules are the same…
Not for college. One robot is 24x24x24 and another is 15x15x15.
That is utterly hilarious. I don’t suppose you’d be able to access separate dimensions with Vex parts…
To the OP, our region just uses really well made wooden boxes that don’t flex or bend, so you’d just have to make a box that’s 24" or 15".
Our inspector at Worlds last year was definitely not lazy… He sized our robot about fifteen times because it kept hitting the end of a zip-tie, and then once he was done sizing the robot, he failed us because we didn’t know we had to do the VEXnet demonstration, so we didn’t have our controllers… We had to go back to our pit, get our controllers, and go through the inspection process all over again. 
Our team had a inspector at the orlando worlds that was so pickey it was outragous and really funny
Yes, that’s the inspector I was talking about…
yes that black hole is decoration karthik
So…are we going to assume that college robots can get away with the 24^3 and 15^3 sizing limitations? 
Josh Wade inspected my robot along with someone else at Worlds. The sizing tool hit something, and he said that it’s okay as long as the sizing tool moves past it. But if the sizing tool can’t move past a certain point, it fails the test. So, your inspector was a little bit off on the zip-tie thing.
No Josh was just being nice the rule is fit inside a 18" cube but a lot of the time people are very relaxed when it comes to small infractions like zip ties and decorative pocket dimensions. At a tournament my team attended in California we saw teams passing inspection with 19" tall robot but then we got caught for a zip tie sticking out like a millimeter so it just depends. Don’t go trying to get away with things though be good sports and follow the inspection sheet.
I’m not going to say he was wrong, but he was quite picky. To be fair to the inspector, our robot was huge!
It kept moving ever so slightly on its wheels, causing the sizing tool to scrape against the side, and making the picky inspector want to start again… I assure you, though, it was within the 18" cube (if only just).
This is why I like the FTC sizing box.
VEX tournaments have the option of using a sizing box, as well.
The problem with that is that the robot must not touch any side of the box. Our big robot would still struggle with this due to its rolling around on its wheels.