Preventing "Garbage In, Garbage Out" in FRC

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Engineering is not physics. I don't think it should be either.

As engineers, we use rules of thumb every day. Be it tooth strength, aluminium density, motor curves or almost anything else, what we "know" is simply a set of assumptions that are good enough ~%95 of the time. However, there are always statistical anomalies, and we shouldn't try to discount them.

Teaching students rules of thumb isn't a bad technique, it's teaching them how things are done in the real world. If student's ask why, usually their inquisition should be indulged, but we don't need to understand everything about a system to use it, at least not in the way a physicist might. Ask an engineer why a certain alloy of steel has a breaking strength of 25000 psi, and the would most likely answer "because it is." True, it would be great for them to understand at the most basic level (i.e, statistical performance of metallic bonds) why this is true, but it really isn't necessary.

Perhaps I haven't addressed your main point, but I would conclude with this: Engineering rules of thumb don't form the garbage that goes into the making of the robot. They take the garbage of the real world and turn it into more pure, if slightly diluted, data.

There's a massive difference between simply "accepting" material properties without knowing "why" and accepting design philosophies/methods/tools without understanding how and why they exist.