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Unread 02-01-2015, 18:25
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waialua359 waialua359 is offline
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AKA: Glenn
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Re: pic: 2015, Year of swerves?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag View Post
We've wanted to make one for probably a decade now, and still never have. We've been doing FIRST for 14 years now, we have mentors who have been doing it nearly as long, we have full in-house CNC manufacturing capabilities, machining mentors, a very well educated programming mentor from a highly-esteemed institution, and students with 3 full years experience behind them. We have the capability to build two identical robots ( and have done so twice) and access to a full size practice field.

We have downloaded and studied the CAD models of other teams' swerve drives and have twice begun modeling one of our own.

We still have not built a swerve and it's not likely that we will for 2015.

Why not? Years ago our team decided that we would never build a swerve drive during build season unless we'd previously done it during the offseason., and that never happened.

What is our reasoning for that decision? We've determined that the marginal performance gains in the drive system do not outweigh the additional time requirements to design, fabricate, refine, and program it. That time can be spent further developing and refining other parts of the robot.

And this is what frustrates me a little bit about the current state of COTS items. Years ago, teams could gain a significant advantage by heavily investing in the design, development, and manufacturing of these complex systems. Now, you're at a large disadvantage if you choose to do something custom over buying it. Why, you've lost time you literally could have bought. But buy buying it, you've lost the learning process. We're teaching students how to pick things out of a catalog (which is a great skill to have!) rather than teaching them to make the things that are in the catalogs (or better yet not in any catalogs). But, that's another discussion for another thread.

Part of our "problem" is that we doall the manufacturing in house. We can't spend 4 weeks on CAD, send it out to be laser cut and bent on a CNC press brake, and get a robot back in 3 days. We don't have that kind of sponsor like some teams do. If we don't have the mill running on day 2, we don't finish. And that's with a WCD.
David,
a very informative and nice summary of what is probably similar to our situation. Back in 2010, we made a swerve iteration similar to that of 1983 after their 2009 robot, when they graciously shared their CAD files.
Since then, we have never gone back to designing one in the off-season, simply because of time constraints and putting it off with other areas that we try to improve or fix. This is mostly due to retiring mentors, constant change of school admin in a transient school, and other dynamic factors that affect progress.
Like you, we can build everything in-house with enough resources to build more than 1 robot year in and year out. However, we lack enough mentors to overcome the time constraints in building a practice bot. In fact, we barely have enough time to build 1 robot, using a WCD chassis. We've made gradual improvements to it the last several years and feel that the learning aspects that our students have experienced are very rewarding.
We dont have the avenues in Hawaii where we can just send out CAD's to a sponsor and make our frame in a matter of 3 days or less. In summary, this is why our setup is the way it is (doing things all in-house) with the main challenge trying to find additional mentors to help our program.
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Last edited by waialua359 : 02-01-2015 at 18:29.
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