Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Ross
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=54562&
I can't help but think that the Drivetrain "Arm's Race" is not what FIRST is about. Some may feel this is off-topic, but if no robot was capable of exerting a force sufficient to turn the rack or to snap aluminum box tubing, then this wouldn't be a problem.
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For the 2007 season, we used standard off the shelf Andy-Mark servo shifters with the same Brecoflex Supergrip Blue treads many teams have used in past seasons. I do not feel there was anything excessive or special about our drivetrain design. Many teams possess this kind of drivetrain ability - we just let ours push too hard one time too much, and an arm was horribly broken, yet it was still repaired in 15 minutes. We may very well have caused other teams damage during the 2007 season due to our aggressive defense, but
none of it was apparent to us. If this ever happened, I encourage teams to even now PM me and let me know about it if we caused you undue mechanical problems, as we can't learn from our mistakes if we never know we made any. Other accidents happened that were caused by other teams throughout the year - but perhaps none so visceral occurred on such a visible stage? Again, mistakes happen, and sometimes someone does something
dumb and incredibly foolish during the course of making that mistake. We apologize for those mistakes and we hopefully move on.
We did realize there was such a thing as too much oomph and overkill when we designed and builit the custom three-motor shifters and didn't have enough weight to complete the offensive part of our robot - the ramps. We designed the robot to easily climb other ramps, deploy (eventually) effective 2 @ 12 ramps, and play effective defense. I do not feel we overfocused on a single aspect of the game, and our weight budget was ultimately distributed appropriately enough.
I would encourage rookie teams of limited means to use a defensive base as a start, but not make that base the sole design objective for their build season. I do agree that we should raise the bar and ask them to tackle multiple game objectives if it's within their means to do so. But to some teams, just getting the robot to run around and be mobile is success and inspiration enough for them to continue in the program.
But back to one of the main points that keeps this on topic with the discussion, I do believe some kind of FIRST- or team-produced defensive tutorial would help everyone understand what constitutes proper driving and robot interactions and what is typically not allowed. If FIRST constructed the video's development much like the safety animation contest with a list of required criteria to cover, not only would they save on production costs, but perhaps many teams who participated in the contest would learn about safe defense before the build season even got under way? Like Adam mentioned, refs don't even know what to define as ramming. Wouldn't a visual demonstration involving 2 robots, staged according to FIRST's official direction, help refs and participants alike to understand the true definition? Everyone also calls for simpler rules. Well a picture (actually, 30 pictures a second or what have you) is worth a thousand words.