As others have said it’s all down to the design philosophy you take. Do you go for the do it all powering through ‘bruiser’? Or the nimble light on it’s feet simple design?
Yes the bots will play the game differently. It’s up to you to see how high you can push the ceiling in the early weeks of the season when you decide on a direction to go.
Having done turrets on swerve bases twice: glad I did, I learned a lot. Still a firm believer in having redundant scoring degrees of freedom, (esp in defense pick and place games like 2019). Will I do turrets in the future? Game dependent obviously, but I am really leaning towards simple “do 90% of the game challenges REALLY well” with limited points of failure bots.
“Turrets are definitely not easy to optimize and if you do not have the resources to do swerve I would not run a turret in the first place”
I disagree here.
From a software perspective, in 2020 a sophomore was able to program our turret to do everything we wanted it to do. That same programmer couldn’t develop a “good” swerve drive code in 2021 or 2022.
Mechanically speaking, the 2020 turret was very basic.
Lazy Susan found on Mcmaster
Belt bolted at a fixed location on the Susan to cause rotation. (Ideally would’ve been a printed pulley, but we didn’t have a large enough 3d printer at the time)
Aluminum plates top and bottom for shooter mounting and mounting everything to the rest of the bot.
Baby neo on a VP box for rotation.
Mechanical hard stop to zero off of.
The swerve used by 2137 is SDS. So no mechanical development was needed.
Picture of Shooter+Turret (minus a couple of parts)
Yeah thats pretty much all I need to hear to not both spending the time on turret. It really just comes down to how you want to play the game in most cases.
I know everyone loves the concept of shooting on the move and allowing the turret to aim as you drive but I’m not convinced how practical that typically is anyways. Especially not in Lob style shooting like 2022. Maybe in more trajectory style shooting games. (I’m sure there were teams shooting on the moving very successfully in any game but in 2022 seemed like most Einstein teams were stopping and shooting).
A little tangential but related to the OPs post personally a similar thing that all robots had ,swerve+turret WCD+turret swerve+Fixed, are great intakes and these mechanisms tend to get left till the season, but you can start to develop great intakes in the off season,254 2018 1323 2022/23, would be some good examples of what you can make, but also giving your teams a sense of what makes a touch it own it intake can probably improve your robots more than a turret can.
I know this has been said a few times, but it really entirely depends on the game. I’d say this year it is really hard to justify swerve + turret, in my opinion its too much added complexity to turret your entire structure. However, in a year like 2022 or 2017 it would be very reasonable to run a turret + swerve. In my opinion, there are only 2 real upsides to running turret + swerve; shooting while moving and defense. As time to align a turret is not all that much faster than swerve, and if your stopping anyway I really don’t see the benefit. Also, shooting while moving is really hard to pull off and a turret only provides small benefits against defense when paired with swerve.
We ran a fixed (adjustable hood) shooter on a Swerve chassis in 2022 which worked fairly well, but still had its limitations. During the off-season we added a turret, with the ultimate goal being to have “shoot while moving” capabilities. It worked alright but was limited by some of the physical constraints of other mechanisms, and the code didn’t really have time to get developed fully for it.
Overall, my advice would be that you shouldn’t totally discount a turret just because you have swerve, but swerve does reduce the need for turrets somewhat. If you have the resources, it wouldn’t be a bad off-season project to pursue.
Beyond that, one thing my team is considering for the off season is developing a good over-the-bumper intake design, since we’ve struggled with that in the past.
I think the answer is “it depends”. There are usually several ways to have a successful robot.
A good analogy is when discussing which traits are needed for NFL QBs. You could say mobility or escapeability is critical to being a successful QB, citing Mahomes, Allen or Hurts who routinely use their mobility to escape the pass rush to extend plays. On the flip side, you could point to guys like Tom Brady and Payton Manning or Cousins who routinely beats the rush by reading the defense and using a quick release before the pass rush gets to them. (You can do this same thing with arm strength and reading defenses – Marino and Favre weren’t known for being great at reading defenses or throwing with anticipation but their really strong arms meant they often could just throw when they saw a receiver open).
Last year, 1678 didn’t ‘need’ a turret because they were a smaller, very quick and well driven robot that could could drive away from defense just enough to turn to the goal and shoot. 1706 probably ‘needed’ a turret since we were a bigger, slower robot that needed the ability to shoot with a defender on our bumper because we couldn’t consistently get open shots. Last year, top teams needed a solution against defense and a turret was one of a few solutions.
You sound like nearly everyone at our picklist meeting when I brought up Kirk Cousins went to 107’s high school…Maybe it wasn’t the best analogy for this group
Swerve drive allows teams so much flexibility on the field and with all the resources now, is a relatively small time investment. There are absolutely benefits to a turret, some that are minimized by having a swerve drive but some that definitely still stand even while running swerve. Also, depending on the year, these benefits are either expanded or minimized even further. The ability to overcome defense and shoot on the fly are the main ones. However, these benefits do not apply to most teams!
Only the top teams are capable of effectively utilizing both swerve and turrets effectively. The time investment into developing a turret is in no way worth it for teams that can’t make the most of both. Any team considering this would probably be better served investing this time into developing the recurring mechanisms (shooters, elevators, intakes, overall electrical, etc.) and driver practice. Every team should aim to be running driver practice as of week 4 to week 5. Adding mechanisms that would push the driver practice start date back are a mistake and could no way make up for the loss in production. Also, if you add a turret, that is another aspect of your robot to iterate throughout the season and another mechanism that will take motors where you are already committing 8 or in some cases 12 to your swerve drive modules.
254 is the most successful team in FRC history. They obviously are in the top tier of teams that could make use of both. Important to note that this year they still didn’t use one though.
My point is that unless you’re a top team, you shouldn’t waste your time because your resources are better spent elsewhere.
Note that when we included a turret in our 2022 robot design, we weren’t convinced we’d actually wind up keeping it - it’s just easier to design around the assumption of a turret (then change your mind later) than to go in the other direction.
The reason we kept it was because our robot wound up being too fat for the “quick and nimble” archetype that teams like 1678 and 2910 perfected (with our 2 intakes, large drivebase, and truss react climb), so our best path to having a solution that could get away from defense revolved around the turret. In the end we wound up finding value in shooting while pinned, directing opponent balls wherever we wanted them, and not stopping to shoot.
I think “small fast simple robot” and “big turreted shoot on the move robot” were two local maximums of robot performance for top teams last year, and it wasn’t surprising that many Einstein alliances had one of each (they complemented each other nicely). That said, I think “small fast simple robot” (as usual) was the far better choice for teams with more limited experience or resources.
It does add flexibility with your kinematics most years, needing to move the drive base to use your end effector is a pain and then you have to link your IK to the drive base and then add collision prevention software it’s a whole mess.
The “need” is really year to year and design to design. But I don’t think they’ll ever be fully obsolete. In my experience, it’s far easier to control a turret quickly and precisely than it is a whole robot. In 2017 shooter discussions the phrase, “swerve is a turret” kept coming up, and that was definitely not true for us that year. There’s a degree of error in the true angle of the robot that can stack up with your IMU, drift, and steady state error on the setpoint. A turret can be used to compensate for that because it has finer control. Rapid React’s goal was so big it didn’t matter, but the Infinite Recharge back goal or the Steamworks boiler required a higher degree of precision and I’m sure we’ll see another goal like that again.
Strategically, I think it’s hard to say they’re not worth it. If you’re a team that gets consistent defense, you want to become completely indefensible. One of the best ways to achieve that is to give your driver options. Being able to rotate whatever mechanism you have is nearly invaluable to me. For a game like Rapid React if someone has you squared up against their bumper and you have no turret, you can’t rotate to your setpoint to get off a shot, we found that on our off-season B bot Emerson mentioned above. If you have a turret and someone hits you and tries pushing your robot, it’s easier to just shoot over them and take back off again with a turret.
To answer your question --the next game that is similar to 2021/2022 we will strongly consider a turret even with the swerve drive. Obviously, game specific trade-offs need to be discussed but I think there’s a lot of value with turrets in addition to swerve in general.
The only thing I’d add to your list is if your shooter is a fixed angle maybe making sure you can incorporate a shooting hood or something so you can shoot at different distances. I think being able to shoot at any distance is probably the first step to solve before worrying about shooting at any angle relative to your drive base.
Also stuff like good intakes, indexers, spindexers, etc… are worth looking at during the off-season. Being able to quickly acquire game pieces helps offset less capability in other areas of the robot.
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