pic: 2015, Year of swerves?

[dradel]

Originally Posted by Dunngeon

Aren't you doing the exact same thing when t-boning a robot? I honestly think you're putting too much stock in the x formation, it's not as great as you make it out to be. It's potentially a slight bonus, not a primary one.
Edit: Travis beat me to it

Also, if a team is using PID control on the modules it's nearly impossible to rotate the caster with outside forces.



I don't like losing... I joined our team because I wanted to win anything, awards or robots. Robots that look cool but lose ( as in don't play the game well) aren't inspiring to me.

There is a big difference between not liking to lose, and know how to lose and learning from it. Those that get all pissy when they lose are going to find the "real world" hard to handle!

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by asid61

Well, "swerve is never necessary" is like "moving is never necessary". You can sit still for a whole match with blinking lights and compete with that. Great. However, it's probably advantageous to move a little bit at least.

Of course I disagree with the idea that swerve is as essential as moving itself. However, I'm going to guess you mean that in a rhetorical sense- that both are broad generalizations. There many factors that decide the success of a robot, and trying to categorize success based on the drivetrain is pointless.
Many of the swerves that came out of 2014 are some of the best ever made, and therefore swerve gained a lot of popularity (and rightfully so, looking at you 2451). Why did we see a lot of good swerve? Because 2014 was a great game for it, and some teams have been developing a swerve for years, waiting for the opportunity to use it. Did a swerve drive win champs? No. Why? Because other robots defeated the swerve bots.
The fact is, there is no "best drivetrain." These broad generalizations like "ALWAYS USE TANK" and "SWERVE IS BETTER THAN TANK" are invalid because they attribute the success of a robot to one small aspect of the robot. Sure, the drivetrain is important, but its significance is nothing compared to everything else that goes into making a successful robot. The success of a robot is determined by every component, every design, every man-hour, every line of code, and every strategic discussion contributed to it; all of these factors are what make a robot successful, not just the drivetrain.

To respond more directly to OP, there's a lot of of post-2014 swerve hype, but it all comes down to what happens this weekend.

[Bryce2471]

Disclaimer: This post reflects only my opinion.
I really like some of the discussion going on in this thread. Before reading it, I wasn't 100% locked down on what my goals were for this FRC season.

I love to win. I'm very competitive, and I've come extremely close to national titles in several other competitions before (Most notably Chess and FLL), so one of my main goals this season (along with most other people) is to win. However, my view on this competition has been molded over the years, and after winning the Dean's List Award last year; I really want to inspire people on my team, and on others.

This was a battle going on in my mind for the past year, and I think I've come to a conclusion: I wan't to build the best robot, even if that means that I don't go quite as far in the competition.

That statement may seem strange, but it might help if I give some examples:
1) In 2012, I believe that team 1717 had, by far, the best robot in the world. They had amazing capabilities, with a deadly accurate shooter and an awesome swerve system. However, they were not the world champions because there robot broke down in the field elims.
2) I don't mean to bring down the 2013 world champions but I would have much rather built 469's robot than any of the robots that won. This is because, in my mind, they built the better robot. 469's machine could play more of the game, more effectively than any of the winning robots, in my opinion.

So even though I want to win, I don't want to do it with a better implementation of the same robot that everyone else built.
(This is not to say that you have to use swerves to have the better robot; Only that I want to build the better robot, and swerves can slightly help in doing that.)

[Pault]

I find it strange that people in this thread are not impressed by clean, efficient, well engineered robots. Creativity and producing the best, most capable robot design, although important, isn't always the mark of great engineering. Sometimes it is taking a fairly standard design and making it better than every other implementation. For a real life example, think about cars. Although having many features in a car is nice, what really seperates low end cars from high end cars is build quality.

So with that being said, I don't think a competitive robot can be "boring", because to me the best robots are the ones built to be the most competitive.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

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.

[matthewdenny]

Originally Posted by Pault

I find it strange that people in this thread are not impressed by clean, efficient, well engineered robots. Creativity and producing the best, most capable robot design, although important, isn't always the mark of great engineering. Sometimes it is taking a fairly standard design and making it better than every other implementation. For a real life example, think about cars. Although having many features in a car is nice, what really seperates low end cars from high end cars is build quality.



So with that being said, I don't think a competitive robot can be "boring", because to me the best robots are the ones built to be the most competitive.

Diffrent people are inspired by different things. Do what is an inspiration to you and your team, and regardless the outcome on the field you can never lose.

[MrForbes]

it's interesting that this thread disappeared before kickoff...and it turns out that the 2015 game is one that really needs swerve drive