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If you look at all 3 national winners, none of them shifted. Obviously an optimized non-shifting robot is far superior to a shifting robot. Less that can go wrong.
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I'm actually somewhat surprised nobody noticed that our robot (469) had a transmission. It ran a drill and a CIM on each side (4 motors total). This is our third year with a transmission, and our second with a custom box.
The reason I'm so surprised is that our transmission had a 7:1 split. We avoided using our high gear much in the finals becuase we bent a driveshaft in our division semis, and at high RPM it threw the chains off the sprockets. We used high gear mainly for the autonomous portion in the finals, and low gear for the rest of the match. The unusually huge split in the transmission was nice, becuase we were pretty fast in high, and powerful in low.
The problem we encountered was that at our first regional, we were snapping shafts (1/4" hardened steel I believe). Once the problem was fixed, the actual transmission gave us no more trouble. However, the cantelievered output shaft was another story . . .
I think our transmissions have been a key part of our robot design for the past few years. Every game has an aspect where speed is necessary, and another where power is needed. Once the kinks are worked out, transmissions can be a very powerful feature.
Jeff Alpert
Team 469