Quote:
Originally Posted by DampRobot
Cory, I respect your team, and I don't mean to call you out, but your drivetrain is so similar year to year that certain interpretations of the rules would rule out your type of design reuse.
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The thing is, at this stage, I'm sure that 254 doesn't need any existing information about their drive from their old robots and could 'design' it again -- where design is taken to mean that they'll create all digital and physical assets from nothing -- in a trivial amount of time. Perhaps they already do. Does redoing the work of making part models and writing gcode constitute a new design? Do they have to arbitrarily move holes, change tolerances, or alter the shape of some component to arrive at a new design?
If you accept the latter option as the definition of a new design, which is to say that teams must make parts materially different from year to year, I don't believe that anyone outside of these teams is qualified to make a judgement about whether it's changed. So, why bother?
I don't think you can expect to regulate what it means to reuse a 'design'. The better approach, and that which I think FIRST has so far followed, is to create a competitive environment that rewards systems and strategies that are specialized to game tasks.