Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[muffinofsteel]

The part of this debacle that irks me the most is how it could make FRC robots use the same basic design of a robot. This though may be a result of games becoming "samey", ie. shoot the ball into the goal. There's only so many ways you can put a sphere into a goal. The fact that we have COTS manipulators may be due to this lack of variety in the games. For the past 10 years, FIRST has had 5-6(lunacy) games involving spheres and goals, allowing teams to use designs from older games, which in my opinion is boring. The one thing Recycle Rush got right was being a unique game. It had a game piece that was only used once before in Stack Attack, and even though the game was boring, the designs were not. There weren't any viable COTS manipulators to stack the totes. I saw variety at competitions, due to a lack of reusable designs and COTS parts, which i don't expect to see as much this year. This game seems to lean towards having a low drive train and ball collector, which with COTS parts isn't a difficult feat. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if a box on wheel was an alliance captain.

[pilleya]

Originally Posted by muffinofsteel

There weren't any viable COTS manipulators to stack the totes.

There were many COTS manipulator systems available to stack the totes.

Just look at Andymark, they came out with tote stacker kit including all the necessary parts. Extrusion just had to be cut to size and assembled

http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-3098.htm

Vexpro and Competition Robot Parts also had gussets which allowed linear motion

http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexpro/ve...ar-motion.html

http://www.competitionrobotparts.com...elevator-kits/

[Knufire]

Originally Posted by pilleya

There were many COTS manipulator systems available to stack the totes.

Just look at Andymark, they came out with tote stacker kit including all the necessary parts. Extrusion just had to be cut to size and assembled

http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-3098.htm

Vexpro and Competition Robot Parts also had gussets which allowed linear motion

http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexpro/ve...ar-motion.html

http://www.competitionrobotparts.com...elevator-kits/

All of these were linear motion kids. None included any sort of mechanism that interfaced with the totes; simply parts that would help you build a constrainted linear motion track that wouldn't bind.

[Jared Russell]

There have only been two years I can think of where a COTS mechanism could have given teams a spectacular advantage: minibots in 2011, and can grabbers in 2015.

Every other season, it takes more than one mechanism to play the game at a high level, and integrating various mechanisms into a cohesive robotic system is a huge part of the challenge (that happens to mirror most of real life engineering). COTS components all the way up to subsystem scale can help a team significantly, but honestly, the more substantial the COTS subsystem, the fewer options it gives to elegantly integrate it with everything else.

As a result, there will ALWAYS be an advantage in being able to fabricate specific parts tailored to your overall robot design. You can package things more efficiently, save weight, achieve higher levels of performance, fill in gaps in the COTS offerings, and fit more functionality into a robot that isn't constrained to a set of discrete COTS parts that may or may not place nice together. You not only can do this, you MUST do this (in this era of FRC) if you want to build a truly world class robot. I don't see this changing any time soon.