I need to know if water cooling is legal on the robot.
and if it’s not legal should it be.
- Yes - water cooling is amazing
- No - Water and robots are a terrible idea
0 voters
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Why?
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I would say yes if it could only be your own footgun - the potential to harm other robots and make things worse for field staff doesn’t make me enthusiastic about it.
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- For coprocessors, more than 2x performance in photon vision in Raspberry pi’s from testing.
- Motor cooling, cooler motors perform far better and reduces the risk of burnout.
- Central cooling, I don’t want to have to use 12 fans and two dozen heatsinks to cool m six overclocked coprocessors anymore
3 Likes
I don’t see a small amount of water used as a thermal sink doesn’t seem to pose much a risk to anyone especially not compared to the systems already in common use in first, does a small amount of water in a sealed system cause anywhere near as much damage as a Falcon motor singing a thirty pound mechanism around.
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Run a few seasons with no pneumatics leaks and then we’ll talk.
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The only potentially applicable rule I see from 2023 is R203:
*General safety. ROBOT parts shall not be made from hazardous materials, be unsafe, cause an
unsafe condition, or interfere with the operation of other ROBOTS.
I would submit that water is not a “hazardous material”. However, convincing an inspector that your cooling system doesn’t violate section g of R203 will be more difficult:
g. hydraulic fluids or hydraulic items,
Though I think this subsection is intending to rule out “hydraulic” (pressurized fluid) systems. I don’t feel that a passive water cooling system is in violation of the intent of this rule.
I have gone over a decade without having a water bottle leak at an event, though I don’t store my water at 120psi. 
8 Likes
Good luck keeping it sealed on a robot…. And seeing most teams pneumatics, good luck starting with it sealed.
I would say no under R204, general safety. G in the blue box specifically rules out hydrolic fluids, and I think this is close enough to that under the intent of the rules.
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Say there were a game with a similar endgame to 2016. A robot climbs and their partner parks underneath. The climbing robot’s water cooling loop begins leaking, and now both them and their alliance partner have their electronics ruined, and the field staff now have to clean up the spill and repair any ways the field may have been damaged as a result. (wet carpet, peeling tape, bleeding vision targets, warped plywood)
While robots can have damaging mechanisms, they get inspected for safety before playing and some would say they’re unavoidable to enable gameplay in most FRCFIRST Robotics Competition games. Water cooling is not something that is necessary to play games unlike extensions out of frame perimeter.
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Are you sure that being specifically referenced in the rules isn’t just there to prevent them from putting hydraulics on the robot? . Not only that but hydraulic fluid and water are two VERY different things.
In addition, having a closed water loop that never gets opened again once filled won’t leak very easily when properly sealed. (Although I think this is the center of your argument, which is that teams probably won’t properly seal the loop.) There’s also no reason to open the loop ever.
3 Likes
Your “what-if” seems hyperbolic in terms of the potential carnage of a water spill. Imagine if there was an unsealed cup of water on the FMSField Management System table!
To prevent hypotheticals like above, surely? Mechanisms with stored spring energy can be incredibly dangerous and are arguably not necessary for gameplay, but we allow them.
1 Like
I’m lost.
Isn’t the root of Hydraulic “from Greek ὕδωρ (hydor) ‘water’, and αὐλός (aulos) 'pipe”? In larger contemporary use it’s just using a liquid in an enclosed system, like pneumatic means using a gas. Water is a liquid. I don’t see any way around this, nor do I see a need to argue scenarios. The answer is no.
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Are they, though?
The original hydraulics fluid, dating back to the time of ancient Egypt, was water.
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Yes, but we aren’t talking about ancient Hydraulic fluid. We’re talking about modern hydraulic fluid, which is 99% mineral oil, which does make a mess and is hard to clean up. Distilled Water is not as hard to clean up, and is just as conductive as mineral oil (Which is to say not very conductive) for a short period of time. Distilled water is in fact an insulator due to the lack of minerals and other ions in the water to conduct electricity.
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I’m all for pushing boundaries with controls and such, but I’m really wondering if having six overclocked processors is totally necessary, or whether you could consolidate from RPis to something more powerful like a minipc, orange pis, or a jetson.
Also, how does this 2x performance increase actually translate to concrete robot gains, and how do those compare to the trouble of powering and communicating with coprocessors (and potentially water cooling). Computer vision fps is absolutely a realm of diminishing returns.
A side note, I’ve seen maybe 5 teams where autoplacement is actually faster than just driving by hand. This will improve into the future of course and if you want to really be on the bleeding edge go for it. Though consider what a huge controls stack gives to you compared how much time, money, robot space you spend maintaining it.
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I will accept your submitted definition for what constitutes a “Hydraulic fluid”:
A hydraulic fluid or hydraulic liquid is the medium by which power is transferred in hydraulic machinery
This does not describe the nature of a cooling system, which moves a fluid to transfer heat rather than transfer power. Thus, a cooling system containing water does not contain hydraulic fluid as it does not use fluid to transfer power to hydraulic machinery.
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Oh, I’m sorry, I must have missed the word “modern” in the rule….
The answer is no water on the robot.
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Again, you are bending the definition of Hydraulic fluid away from its modern common definition. Not only that, but the water isn’t acting as a hydraulic fluid. By the letter of the rule, water is allowed on robots as long as it isn’t used as a hydraulic fluid. You are being incredibly pedantic with this, obviously the rules makers when they came up with the no hydraulic fluid rule were referring to common hydraulic fluid you can get today to run hydraulics, not some BC era Egyptians using water as a hydraulic fluid.
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Yes voters:
WATER GAME!!!
No voters:
I am thinking logically
12 Likes
Good luck with actually getting it past inspection, regardless of what off-season CD wants to claim…
BTW, I have, in fact, told teams to remove water from their robots before under the R204 equivalent of that particular year, and it’s a ruling I 100% stand by, as does the venue staff.
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