FRC pocketing

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

I'll provide a little history behind my comment, and why I think JVN's hypothetical "Mr Forbes says we don't need to do pocketing!" *140 lb robot* is quite humorous.

I started working with team 1726 on the last weekend of build their rookie season. My son was on the team, and he asked me to come in and help them get the 140 lb robot down to 120 lbs, and they only had a few days to do this. So, I helped do a lot of pocketing and we got it to 119.9 lbs and all was well. Of course, I got hooked on the whole FRC thing... The next ten robots the team built, I was around at the beginning of the design process, and we didn't ever build another robot where we had to chase weight by cutting material away like that. Instead, we kept track of weight from the beginning of the design. And we didn't use a material because "that's how robots are made"...we kept open minds, and used materials that met our requirements of cost, local availability, weight, strength, stiffness, ease of fabrication, suitability for that game, etc. It turns out you can use a wide variety of materials to build robots. We've used fiberglass, wood, steel, aluminum, polycarbonate, etc over the years.

Mainly, I see the extensive use of CNC material removal as kind of wasteful. This mostly has to do with the fact that I'm cheap and lazy.

If you have the resources to purchase extra material and then cut it away, then go for it!

I think the points you make here are valid for many teams, but there are two other points relevant teams should be aware of.

Each team has unique resource, so for many teams it might be more efficient at the team level to use 1/4" plate and pocket it every time than try to figure out lighter methods (ideally some compromise can be found here).

The other point is that there are some games where the top 10% of teams or so that try to do it all (or some large subset of doing it all) and to pull this off most of those teams (based on the above point) can't hit weight without pocketing.

To sneak in a third point, there are reasons that coming way under weight can be valuable (namely faster acceleration and less battery use).