[Clem1640]

There are a number of areas in which pneumatics out-perform motors (and, of course, visa-versa). Team 1640 usually uses pneumatic devices in our robots, but in two cases (2006 & 2012) we did not for weight-saving reasons.

Having the ability to utilize pneumatic actuators in our design process provides additional degrees of freedom to enable us to design the best robot that we can. More degrees of freedom increases design difficulty, but potentially (generally) improves the product performance. Having more degrees of freedom does not mean that you need to use them; this is part of the design decision tree which engineers need to make.