[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by MechEng83

At my company, we have an entire function called "Reliability Engineering" There are ways to quantify reliability in terms of RPH (repairs per hundred) CPE (cost per engine - we make engines, but it could be CPR - cost per robot), and MTBF (mean time between failure). Reliability is very much a metric in industrial settings. Decisions are made and resources are applied based in part on the reliability numbers.

An FRC robot isn't going to have hundreds of like units to generate RPH, but the other items are real things that each team should consider.

I should have qualified my post with "in the context of FRC," but I think the point still stands. In my experience, much of the rating in our design matrices essentially comes down to intuition, and anecote because we have no practical way to quantify many of the important attributes (for all of the metrics you've mentioned, I can't think of any for which I'd have sufficient data). They're still useful for facilitating the decision-making process, but they're far too uncertain to rely on in the place of in-depth discussion.