I don’t know if it’s just me. But I’ve noticed way less teams using pneumatics the past few years than they have historically. I used to see pneumatics on probably at least half of robots when I was a student, yet by 2023 I was able to go entire events inspecting without ever touching a pneumatic system on the checklist. My own team hasn’t used pneumatics since 2022 despite using them frequently in previous years.
Does anyone have insight into this? Is it to save weight? More motor options (and more PDP ports?). Simpler robots? Or is it sampling bias and pneumatics are as common as ever?
Less weight, less plumbing, less headaches, and less chances of failure.
Look at HOT Team 67 in match 3 of their division finals in 2022. It’s the main reason they didnt win their match to get to Einstein.
I see it the same as using motors with integrated controllers.
Past weight and failure concerns, the games are getting faster each year. A motor is a better solution for most systems now at the higher levels of play.
One extremely bad situation that compounded during 2022.
We heavily relied pneumatics in 2022, they were our climber, climber release and intake. In Livonia finals we encountered a massive leak, and lost. At worlds, we fried our pneumatic control module somehow, and we were essentially dead in the water our entire worlds run.
Pneumatics is a commitment. You need a PCM, you need a compressor, you need tanks, regulators, solenoids, tubing, etc… They just occupy a lot of physical space on the robot.
Did a lot of teams use an off board compressor? It’s not something I ever personally saw, but I could see it making sense for a one-off mechanism like a climber.
For my team, we last used them for our 2023 robot. We saw that it’s too much headaches doing the logistics and work, so we opt to not use them anymore after 2023.
2016 we were off robot, but the only use was the shooter. It saves a lot of weight and space to do off robot if you can manage it, but it’s also useful to be able to refill during matches.
I think it also should be noted that designing a robot without pneumatics is much easier. Also, with 20 motor slots, it is almost impossible to reach motor limits, so just adding a motor or two is easy.
In a world with teams already at the limits of the battery, more battery consumption is a bad thing.
Air storage takes significant space, and it is generally advantageous to have a smaller robot. It’s easier to pack an extra motor in compared to all the storage, compressor, tubing, regulators, and control systems.
Motors have high def encoders built right in now - it’s trivially easy to have a motor rotate an axis 90deg.
Pneumatics also add a significant number of failure points - each push fitting is a new “if this breaks our important mechanism doesn’t work.”
Pneumatics don’t really increase simplicity (students are already familiar with how to set up a motor), they use significantly more weight and space, add more failure points, and use more power. There’s not really much left in the tradeoff equation that leans “use pneumatics”
I think a lot of these reasons make sense for why teams may choose not to use pneumatics, but I feel like aside from more PDP slots these don’t fully explain the decrease if that makes sense. Like. Why now? What in the meta has changed to cause such a steep dropoff? Because clearly there was historical reason to think the space and complexity were worth it.
One “why now” factor is that brushless/swerve meant the death of shifting gearboxes. This used to be one guaranteed mechanism that more or less demanded pneumatics, and once you get past that initial threshhold where all the storage hardware is on board, adding additional pneumatic mechanisms would generally be less weight/complexity than a motor. But now that the top level drivetrains don’t demand pneumatics, it takes a game-specific mechanism to force the upfront weight/space cost of storage onto the robot, and that can usually be designed around. Especially in shooting games.
Folks have brought it up above, but seriously - the requirement for an onboard compressor all but killed pnuematics. The footprint required for a pneumatics system grew exponentially with this rule. Combine that with less space needed for things like motor controllers, and we found ourselves questioning why we would force ourselves to find space for a compressor in the bottom of the robot when we could just use a motor in the new power distribution system that allowed us the use of more motors. A motor that spins once a match actually takes up less space than a pneumatics cylinder (pancake or not) that actuates once a match, and weighs less too!
On top of that, pretty much all of the new brushless motors use integrated encoders, allowing you to track position REALLY easily. Its pretty much just as simple to create a two-position mechanism with a motor now…
It is really just the combination of:
Required On-Board Compressor
Brushless Motors w/ Built in Controllers taking up less space
More Power Slots, allowing you to use more motors
Motors using integrated encoders
There’s not much more to it…
Had only one or two of these “events” happened, we might still see more pneumatics, but all of these happening in like, under 3 years?, ruined pneumatics (and for the better of us all IMO)
Oh, and Brushless swerve killed shifting gearboxes. RIP Ballshifter
If you go WAY back in history, too (think like 2013 and earlier…) - robots were SIGNIFICANTLY larger in footprint, making pneumatics systems much easier to integrate without sacrificing packaging elsewhere.
isn’t trivial either -fittings, filter/silencer, tape, tools, gauges, relief valve, pressure sensor, software (maybe), expertise to solidly mount and assemble, pass inspection, extra battery in the queue to charge the tanks, etc.
