Philosophies on design reuse

[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.