Durability in FRC

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

As a drive mentor, this is pretty much the single most important design constraint I deal with in FRC. I don't care how impressive-looking and feature-packed your drive is; if at any point it fails during a match, it has cost you more than the added features could have possibly given you over a simpler design.

Keep it simple, keep it durable, keep it serviceable. You cannot break any of those rules, ever, if you want your drive to do its job. If you've got a choice between overbuilding and underbuilding, always choose the former...

Simple, durable and serviceable are all great, but you really can alternatively approach them as trade-offs if you're willing to take the risk. If I'm not going to be simple (e.g. our swerve), I better be seriously serviceable and/or durable. We've managed both, though with emphasis on the former: we can mitigate almost any issue in an elims timeout. The modules also very durable, probably as much so as most tank drives, but if there's a failure we'll swap it and fix it off-robot. We also deliberately underbuild some other features for weight. For instance, this year our side bumper supports every 8" are very, very bent. We could have built them stronger, but we wanted the weight, so we accepted the trade-offs of the bending and necessary servicing. Speccing them was nerve-wracking, and we had contingencies if it just wasn't enough, but they've done their job.

Back in 2010 (our first year of swerve drive), if the goal was to perform well on the field that year, our complexity-based failures probably "cost you more than the added features could have possibly given you over a simpler design". But I doubt you could find anyone wouldn't do swerve that year if given another chance. Why? Well, one, the students loved it and learned more than they had in any other design. Moreover, we wouldn't be where we are today if we didn't start somewhere. This year, ok, we've had a couple in-match failures, maybe one even cost us a match. But I seriously doubt we would have been on Einstein without the swerve--it was just so integral to our strategy/alliance. There were of course other strategies which were very successful (and 6 that were more), but I doubt we could have implemented them to better effect than the one we chose, in part building off that under-performance in 2010. In short, there are big-risk-big-reward drive features that really are worth it, even if there's a risk of "if at any point it fails during a match". It's just that in some cases, you have to be willing walk the longer arc of history.