Philosophies on design reuse

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by ToddF

For the first time, our team has managed to do some serious development work during the off-season. We have debated internally about how best to utilize what we have learned while staying both within the letter and the spirit of the design reuse rules.

Bravo, not only is the team really moving forward by learning valuable things, they have a mentor (you) who is asking for a community opinion on something that is admittedly a grey area. We need more mentors like you.

We re-use the same drivetrain concept every year, but redesign it to accommodate whatever transmissions, wheels, and manipulators needed for the game. We don't actually design it before we know what the game is, but it generally has 2 side plates forming a drive assembly (1 for each side) and a frame connecting each assembly into a chassis.

So, in your case, if you use the basic concept, but adjust the material choice, drilled holes, and other details to fit your game-specific design, you should be OK.

If you really want to use the exact design, you must not unless you publish the details (e.g., a dimensioned drawing, CAD files, etc) sufficient for other teams to duplicate it - by posting it publicly* you have made it COTS, and therefore OK to use.

It is a judgment call. Your kids will learn something from how you approach this. Make your grandmother (who knows both the rules and the intent better than all of us) proud.

*In a reasonable easy place to find it, not hidden somewhere, of course.

[DampRobot]

To me, this is the type of ethical dilemma that is an intentional grey area. It's like deciding to have a highly sponsor fabricated robot or a team where the mentors have a more hands on approach. It's something up to the team, and FIRST isn't going to regulate it at all. (Please don't let this devolve into a Student Build vs. Mentor Built thread...)

If your team decides that it's illegal or unethical to design things before the season, that's your decision. Just know that you'll be competing against teams that do, and FIRST isn't going to do much about it.

Cory, I respect your team, and I don't mean to call you out, but your drivetrain is so similar year to year that certain interpretations of the rules would rule out your type of design reuse. My personal opinion it's in the best interests of FIRST to allow this type of reuse of design (keeps kids working, thinking, designing, learning, and inspired year round). And, like Cory mentioned, parts can easily have superficial changes to make them legal under certain rules readings. So, it's not as illegal to reuse designs as some would have us think.

Teams that design before the season, whether they actually use this design in season or not, have a advantage. They will know how to design, and they might just have a few good ideas ready to go.

[Madison]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Cory, I respect your team, and I don't mean to call you out, but your drivetrain is so similar year to year that certain interpretations of the rules would rule out your type of design reuse.

The thing is, at this stage, I'm sure that 254 doesn't need any existing information about their drive from their old robots and could 'design' it again -- where design is taken to mean that they'll create all digital and physical assets from nothing -- in a trivial amount of time. Perhaps they already do. Does redoing the work of making part models and writing gcode constitute a new design? Do they have to arbitrarily move holes, change tolerances, or alter the shape of some component to arrive at a new design?

If you accept the latter option as the definition of a new design, which is to say that teams must make parts materially different from year to year, I don't believe that anyone outside of these teams is qualified to make a judgement about whether it's changed. So, why bother?

I don't think you can expect to regulate what it means to reuse a 'design'. The better approach, and that which I think FIRST has so far followed, is to create a competitive environment that rewards systems and strategies that are specialized to game tasks.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Cory, I respect your team, and I don't mean to call you out, but your drivetrain is so similar year to year that certain interpretations of the rules would rule out your type of design reuse.

If you actually sat down and compared CAD models there are subtle differences between every drivebase. There is only one part I can think of that is not materially different year to year and even then things change slightly in the manufacturing process and material selection, which is easily considered part of the design of the part. Every single other part that looks the same has experienced a meaningful design change every year it has been used, for at least the last 4-5 years.

[jvriezen]

Numerous times the topic of re-using something fabricated from a previous year (we often have had a non-functional robot by the next build season and reuse COTS components) there is always a student who says something like

"Why can't we just re-use the bumper fabric with our team numbers already on them, how will 'they' know ?"

I then proceed to explain to them (or get them to realize) that 'they' are (in part) the judges and inspectors at the competition and did they notice that one of their mentors is a Lead Robot inspector and two other mentors are Inspectors?

Its hard to get the notion across that there really is no 'they' and 'us'-- we are all part of the big FRC family.

[ajlapp]

In all seriousness, even if you had a part that did not change at all there are endless ways you could change the design so it's not being reused. You could change the CAM file that generates the G-code to run the machine. You could make trivial dimension changes. You could issue a new drawing revision for some minor callout. You could change radii used on pockets/edges. The list goes on and on.

It's really a silly rule because FIRST is unwilling and probably more importantly unable to outline what qualifies as changing the design enough for them to be OK with it. It's also silly because anything you would re-use exactly as it was from the year before/offseason/etc is most likely a completely trivial part that would gain you no competitive advantage by designing up front.

The rule quite obviously exists to prevent you from designing an entire system of your robot before kickoff and then implementing it immediately, but you really can't design a system that can be used wholesale with no changes, because you have no idea what it needs to do.

Exactly.

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by ajlapp

Exactly.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Cory again.

Hate when this happens...

-RC

[DampRobot]

That is exactly what it is. A moral guideline rather than a rule (such as robot weight, number of appendages, etc).