pic: CVT drivetrain

[Kevin Sevcik]

So.... First and foremost, FIRST is about inspiring students about engineering, science, and technology. Probably it's debatable whether a well designed machine does this better than a finicky innovative one. Obviously, you'd really prefer to have a well-designed and working innovative machine, which would certainly be very award worthy and often does win awards at regionals I've been to. I'm just questioning why you'd give a team an award for a feature on their robot if it didn't work well. It's telling that team and other teams, "Hey, they tried something new and botched it, but it was new."

Anyways, aside from awards, I'm really questioning the design decision to put a CVT on a FIRST bot. Here's my thoughts:

Pros:
Faster acceleration - you can go places a bit faster.
Auto shifting - you don't have to think about down shifting to push.

Cons:
Expensive - belts and non-CNC machining or no belts and CNC
Time-consuming - 190 couldn't get it working well in a season, and the hung in auto in '04
Complex - look at the darn things.
Expensive - see above

Yes, it would be neat. So would any number of other highly complicated systems that could be built and but on a robot. But robots are supposed to be engineered to complete a task well, they're not show pieces or demo boards during the season.