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8 MINI-CIM SWERVE
Would any one else like to see (8) MINI-CIM motors allowed so the swerves can be on par with the (6) CIM tank drives?
Looks like an 8 MINI-CIM motor swerve drive would be very close to power and weight of 6 CIM motor 6WD/8WD. POWER CIM 6 x 337 watts = 2022 watts total power MINI-CIM 8 x 230 watts = 1840 watts total power Within 10% instead of down 50%. WEIGHT CIM 6 x 2.80 lbs = 16.8 lbs MINI-CIM 8 x 2.16 lbs = 17.28 lbs Seems like the current rules favor a 6 CIM tank over a 4 CIM swerve for acceleration and top speed. I personally would like to see this somehow corrected. Maybe separating BAG motors from the MINI-CIM motors and a allowing 8 MINI-CIM motors? This could be calculated by adding the watts of all motors used with a not to exceed. Or even more simply a CIM=1 and a MINI-CIM=.66 or .75 and a maximum of 6 when added up. What's your thoughts? |
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I'm not averse to the rule change, especially if limiting total power is the aim of the rules. 8 mini cims ~= 6 cims.
The performance gain might not meet your expectations though. A tank drive will be better at putting that power to the ground (in a straight line anyway). When accelerating or pushing, the bot will "squat" toward the back wheels. As the weight comes off the front wheels, the force they can apply may become traction-limited, rather than power-limited. In a tank drive the front wheels and back wheels are chained together, so the weight distribution doesn't matter, but in a swerve drive, those front motors may spin uselessly. The math on how big an effect this is is left as an exercise for the reader :) |
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I disagree 100% that there needs to be any rules allowing 8 Mini-CIM motors.
For one, there's already an incredible amount of power in the kit. The more motors, the more opportunity teams have to overload the system. Part of the FIRST challenge is choosing how to allocate resources and weigh different design options. There's no requirement that any teams use a swerve vs 6wd vs mecanum vs ball drive vs walker. Each team must make a choice based on what their objectives are. Nobody's arguing that a walking robot should have special rules to allow them more motors so they can perform equivalently to a 6wd, or that a ball drive should be allowed 20 extra pounds because it's heavy. It's a design consideration that comes with choosing a swerve drive, you are probably trading some drive power to get the extra maneuverability. If you think 6wd has an advantage over swerve because it has much better acceleration, make a 6wd. Lastly, it is possible to get 6 CIM power with swerve-style drive, but you can't do it with a module swerve. Concentric swerves that distribut power from two (or even one) gearbox to multiple swerve wheels but are steered independently is a way to do it. |
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Why does the number of motors need to be divisible by 4?
These types of drive are already very common. I think there's more room for creativity when you are forced to distribute 6 motors evenly, or use 3/4 motors more efficiently. And Z3 symmetry presents another challenge compared to Z4, since there are no proper subgroups. Also 8 MiniCIMs would leave no room for additional 40A circuits, which wouldn't be fantastic if we need to do any heavy-lifting outside the drivetrain. |
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Where's the option for "No, the motor allowances are already overkill"
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We already have more power available than needed. Allowing even more would just serve to make things hit that much harder, break that much quicker, and overall decrease our purpose here. I'd rather we saw less motor power and fewer things breaking from impacts!
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4-Cim (divisible by 2 and 4, TPE = 4) 6-Mini-Cim (divisible by 2, 3 and 6, TPE = 4.5) 2-Cim + 4 Mini-Cim (divisible evenly by 2 only, TPE=5) 8-9015 motors (divisible by 2, 4, and 8, TPE=~4.8) |
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Of all the things to describe with group theory, I must confess drive base configurations hadn't occurred to me. |
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The robot I drove in season had a 6 cim powered shooter (flingapult) 4 mini cim mecanum drive and 3 banebots to pickup. 8 mini cim drive would have been truly awsome. 8 mini cims would allow all 6 cims to be used on mechanisms and still be able to have a strong omni drive. 6 cim + mini cim tank drives would be breaker trippers in most cases. |
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It's not about more/less points of contact with the ground, or about how much power you can put into the drivetrain, or how much traction a given wheel has. It's the balance of all of the above. I don't think that adding two more motors will do all that much--just make ya more likely to be traction-limited instead of torque-limited. |
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2 extra motor controllers, 2 fewer available 40A ports on the PDB - 8 Mini CIMs vs 6 CIMs is a lose IMO.
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On top of that, I feel that anyone who mentions 6 CIMs as what led to success in an anecdote should have a gigantic caveat stickied across their post. I don't know about the exact wording, but perhaps it could say something like Quote:
Full disclosure, 1885 took a beating by powerful drivetrains at champs this past year. Getting double-teamed as a single-speed 11ft/s drive train got very aggravating very quickly. We endured, had some great matches and I know what to do for next year. We even had our very first actual zero-maintenance and very agile drive train this year across 4 competitions. Hopefully I've presented this in such as way that shows more thought has gone into it based upon several years of drive train design experience, rather than a single competition's worth of bias. |
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Yes, a young, inexperienced team naively going "MORE IS BETTER!" and mindlessly adding motors to their drive can easily do more harm than good, and designing a 6 CIM drive in a way that doesn't run into the mentioned problems is nontrivial (we had to swap our gearing before champs last year, and it wasn't because we hadn't put a lot thought into the gearing we originally had), but I don't think that every 6 CIM success story is necessarily ignoring or downplaying the negatives, or overstating the positives. |
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The mistake in question, as I recall, was something to the effect of "Ya know, we didn't REALLY need a 6-wheel swerve for this game." |
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It would be hard and heavy to make us a 4 CIM, 8 Mini-CIM mechanum drivetrain. But, not impossible.
We will just keep adding motors to our drivetrain until we blow a breaker just by accelerating:yikes: |
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This little challenge has been posed before, but I think it's worth posing again.
Use every motor allowed (or as many as needed) in ONE gearbox. This gearbox could then shunt power to any use on the robot--drivetrain, shooter, arm, intake, whatever--via gears and belts. Imagine having 6 CIMs, a bunch of 775s and/or 550s, the full complement of BAGs, and some PG71s all powering drivetrain... or arm... or whatever... This is, after all, the sort of thing used to power machine shops in the way olden times: one power source, every tool has a belt off of that source and a clutch to disengage itself... |
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http://gallery.marswars.org/2014-bui...G_3784.JPG.php
Our swerve was originally setup for 1 cim and 1 mini-cim per module. Ultimately we ended up cutting off the extra spot. Mostly because we wanted to use slip rings and not worry about ripping up wires. |
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8 mini-cim swerves would be pretty cool, but thinking about it, what advantage does more mini-cims allow?
A swerve drive that is compatible with 2 mini-cims is probably compatible with a cim and a mini-cim, because the mounting and speeds are similar. So I don't think adding more mini-cims would be useful. |
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I think it would be possible to do the shunting power method you suggest. And it would be super cool. But it would be easier to use 3 gearboxes; 2 for drive (6 cim + 4 minicim) and 1 for endgame and manipulators (4x RS-775 18v). |
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I don't see how anyone could ever get an advantage from actually using near all allowable motors even now, and I don't think the OP is saying that's the sort of design this encourages. Allowing more motors in this context is to allow more options. Sure you could build two 3 cim 4 mini-cim gearboxes for each side of a tank drive but you're not going to get to use all 3782 watts. Extremes aside... in reality reducing motor restrictions wouldn't change much as the physical and hardware constraints make using all allowed power imposable. As stated before the context is more options and maybe it's doesn't need to be exactly this but I think FRC could use some more variety. |
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The advantage then becomes "find the robot who can't do much on offense and which has 6cims, then tell them to go push the other robots around. If they hit the opponents enough, maybe the opponents will just stop working and then we can win". |
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I think it is unfair to characterize tough defense as "hitting people with the hopes their robot breaks." We played defense a lot this past year, and our goal in robot-robot contact was never to cause damage. Good defense is about being in the right place at the right time and knowing how to interact with the robot you're trying to defend against, not simply hitting them as hard as possible. Having additional motors definitely helps with this, both by allowing you to push for longer when needed without tripping a breaker (especially if your opponent cannot do the same), and by allowing you to get to where you need to be faster (and, as a lot of defense is stop-and-go and rapidly-changing, acceleration is critically important for this). |
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Personally, I would love to see the rules opened up to allow teams to use any number of a few models of motors, and it is up to them to design around tradeoffs of weight and battery consumption. I would never want to see an open field again if we had these rules, however. This year was violent enough. -Nick |
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The reality of the season (particularly when examining 4464's video) is that the defender simply wants to use the acceleration to make up for the fact that it screwed up and was already out of position. This was evident even when examining other events' video (which I did a ton of while scouting for Champs) and correlating the teams who won via defense with teams who had 6 CIMs at champs. The point of this thread, and the counter argument I'm making, is discussing whether or not increasing available power to the drive trains makes sense from a game design perspective. I don't know that you've argued in favor for either so much as you've tried to justify and/or glorify what 6 CIMs can do. Perhaps you could clarify for me? |
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We did not incur a single penalty this year for overly-rough contact. I take that as pretty firm evidence that we were not causing undue damage to other robots out there. I'm sure we contributed a fair bit to other team's wear-and-tear (after DC we found a nice big dent on our AM14U), and I've made no claim that this isn't a "legitimate" effect, but if FIRST did not want this to happen the rules would not explicitly provide for bumper-to-bumper contact between robots. Quote:
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You seem to be making a blanket statement that "any team that claims success due to additional motors on their drive is either downplaying the negatives or was trying to damage other robots." I contend that this is clearly false. Now, there is a discussion to be had about whether or not FRC, as a whole, is better for the move towards bigger and beefier drive-trains, but that is a separate question entirely. |
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The rules allow this. It doesn't meant the rules should allow this. I don't fault 4464 for its defense this year since it was actually pretty clean relative to other matches I've watched. - You capitalized on it - great, I'm glad your team got to move on - at the expense of other teams - not so great - whom you never acknowledged or offered to help afterwards - and here's the point of reducing the allowed power on the drive train. Most defenders didn't care ("undue damage"? Really, we deserved damage?) To phrase it differently... There's a very public story from 2007 about one team's entire mechanism, made out of 1/8" tube and securely attached, being ripped out by a defender with a powerful drive train (for that year) after the defender shoved the offensive robot into the Rack. The comment from a ref supposedly was "well the mechanism should have been made stronger". The very well-worded public counter argument was something like "to account for THAT type of defense, it is impossible to make a robust enough mechanism". The story still applies 7 seasons later. There is no type of "robust", without going to extremes, that can be used to account for the amount of power available to drive trains these days and how teams are choosing to use it. |
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Moreover, "deserved" is a loaded term - rather, there is a certain level of damage that your robot will attain during normal competition that is deemed acceptable under the rules. This has to be the case if robot to robot contact is going to be permitted at all. Designing for and dealing with this is as much a part of the game as building mechanisms to manipulate the game pieces and score points. I do not think our strategy last year went past this standard in terms of impact on other robots. Quote:
And, again, whether 6-CIM drives are a good thing for FRC in general is a completely different question from how beneficial they are in robot design. |
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Question on swerves in general.
If you had a 4 module swerve with 1 cim per wheel in the front. Then 2 cims per wheel in the back. Could you use pid loops to make it work? |
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What's the issue with a 6 CIM 3 wheeled swerve? As far as I can tell, it would be lighter, have less parts, and be more powerful than a 4 wheel 8 mini CIM one. Is traction an issue, or is it just that nobody has done one recently? I would think that with the semi-recent perimeter rule change a 3 module swerve with a triangular or circular chassis would be a good idea.
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Out of curiosity, would it work if you were to have 4 modules, 2 with 1 cim and 2 with 2 cims (so you have a total of 6 cims), and set it up so that the 2 with 2 cims are diagonal to each other and the one cim modules are also diagonal to each other. That way you would have the power of 6 cims without messing up your movement by having one side of your robot more powerful than the other.
(I have little experience with swerve, so please correct me if this idea is flawed) |
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I can't see how allowing 8mini-CIMs will prompt teams to build drive trains with more power than 6 cims. At some point beyond that diminishing returns have to make that impractical. If anything Mechanum, Octocanum, Swerve, Crab, etc. and manipulators would benefit more. |
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Thanks for all the replies about this topic. We know that the GDC won't change the rules, this was just a fun topic to bring up and discuss.
The ultimate goal would be for teams to have more flexibility on their CIM/ MINI-CIM usage. The intention that started this thread. The flexibility to be creative outside of the standardized FRC robot. Our personal desire is added acceleration on a 4 wheel swerve drive that would match a 6-CIM tank drive. We currently could run a CIM and MINI-CIM on each wheel according to last years rules so what would dual MINI-CIMs hurt? I fully agree that the swerve has it's advantages and tradeoffs. -Running two CIMS on two of the four wheel modules would not be optimal as Aren explained. -6wd swerves we feel have a hard time keeping all their wheels on the ground and using all the power available. -3wd swerves remind up of the Reliant Robin and why they made ATC (3-wheelers) illegal. Though I would love to hear from the teams that have successfully used a 3WD swerve. We understand that other teams have successfully utilized the above designs and appreciate their creativity and desire to try something different. For those that are arguing there is too much power already. -The 8 MINI-CIM drivetrain wouldn't be any more powerful than the existing 6-CIM drivetrains, less actually. -We do not encourage or allow intentional high speed ramming from our drivers. This year we did not feel everyone else felt this way. -What keeps a team from running (6) CIMS and (4) MINI-CIMS currently? Power/weight/diminishing returns A special thanks to Brendan for being the open minded voice of reason in this discussion. |
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This thread gave me inspiration for what could revolutionize robot drives. You're welcome. :P
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I am planning to develop a version in the future that uses every legal motor (including window motors to remove the risk of backdrive!) |
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"What does your robot do?" "Well, uhm, it cant shoot, and it cant intake, and it cant score, and it cant turn, but it does fast really really well!" ![]() |
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The opening line of this is...
"Would any one else like to see (8) MINI-CIM motors allowed so the swerves can be on par with the (6) CIM tank drives?" Yes I would love to see swerve drives and tank drives get in meaningful skirmishes. However how would that effect other drive base interactions? I wouldn't want FRC to move to a point where it would be you either make an 8 MC swerve or 6 CIM Tank drive. Lets be real here for a second though. Not all teams prioritize beast mode drive bases... Would 8 mini cim's on drive be equal to those extra mini cim's on scoring? That question is entirely rule dependent and would differ from year to year. If suddenly FRC makes a no contact game then what? Either way I think a major point we are all missing is that 8 mc's would make making an AT-AT more viable. |
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FRC robots are pretty much now limited in motor count by battery capacity, and main breaker current limit so adding legal motors won't really change the number of motors most teams use. I would personally allow certain specific motors, but as many as you would like. I don't see an issue with teams running all mini cims instead of having to use an assortment of motors. If you allow 100 of each motor teams will stick with the same motor counts because the batteries/breakers won't support more than that.
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