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Unread 22-02-2007, 20:39
CraigHickman
 
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Re: Drive Systems... ...The FIRST Arms Race?

After thinking a while on this topic, I've decided to come back and offer another view. It might have been said already, and if so I apologize for restatement.

FIRST is giving us tools to deal with engineering issues in the real world. In the real world, there are no motor number constraints on an issue. If a problem needs 10, or even 15 motors to create a solution, the engineeris will add just that many motors. So I don't see the arms race as that much of an issue. Sure, more tourque helps. But you will find the teams that do the best have the simplest drive systems, and instead have poured their focus into the manipulators.

All in all, what my slightly mangled logic (I need sleep, and breaking a caffeine addiction isn't helping) is trying to say is that we're preparing for the real world, and so limiting something as trivial as motor quantities makes little to no sense. Instead, teams should be given too many options, and should have to sort through the possibilities, in order to learn about simplicity and design elegance, rather than just shoving as many motors onto the system.

[/soapbox]
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