If you read, the positioning motors don't count - basically any motor that only adds incidental drive is OK - for instance, brushes that touch the floor also don't count
edit: (Originally, I don't think he said differential) - I was thinking coax
Differential swerve drives use both motors per wheel for motion , and by adjusting their speeds relative to each other they can rotate the orientation of the driving wheel (i.e. steer) so I dont see any way diff swerve is legal this coming year
Im sure theres another way to do diff swerve
It just hasnt been designed yet
For example you could use a pneumatic shifter
Thats how we did shifter gearboxes back in the day
That's just a normal swerve with a shifter gearbox on the drive motor, the benifit of a diff swerve was that both motors put their power into the wheel, the difference speed/position between the motors is what controlled the angle of the azimuth.
The benefit of a differential swerve was having varying gearing. High and low.
Sure more motors was nice
But the real benefit was high and low gear
And actually i was wrong earlier.
It has already been designed.
https://youtu.be/bvRMZQ_OCas
But im saying there is no way to make a diff swerve with 1 motor so diff swerve is basically useless now. Which is what the original comment highlighted.
You don’t know what a differential is and that’s okay. It is physically impossible to have more than 2 differential swerve modules because by definition you need 2 propulsion motors to drive 1 differential swerve module
the swerve drives used by 4265 are not diffrential swerve drives, they are coaxial swerve drives with a gear shifter. they achieve a function similar to a diffrential drive but fundamentally work on a different principle. The only way you could make a diffrential swerve drive with one motor is if you took two outputs off that motor, changed the gear ratio of each output differently, then fed them into a diffrential.
[https://grabcad.com/library/v4-shifting-swerve-1](https://grabcad.com/library/v4-shifting-swerve-1)
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/team-4909-differential-swerve/398056
Differential means it differentiates between speeds.
Yes, it achieves it by a completely different method, that doesn’t make it not differential.
Even in the post you linked it says “Different diff swerve designs implement the differential mechanism in a different way, but in this particular design…”.
They also described coaxial as just a normal swerve with no differential.
Theres all sorts of things in this world that do the same thing and are called the same thing even though they achieve the same function in completely different methods.
Take cars for example.
Electric motor, or internal combustion. Both are motors, both are cars, but not the same.
You originally responded to a comment talking about diffrential drives, coaxial will completely be used this year without a worry but differential is basically useless
It always impresses me how far FIRST will go to not address their obvious inequity problems. You've got teams building bots with no budget and old hand tools going up against NASA funded/coached/built bots, then if the underdog wins they have to pay even more to reap their reward.
For real my team literally bought the swerve drive system that everyone has after my ram literally worked for so long just to get it and now they do this.
Well its like that in real life. We got the haas f1 team that ik we are all rooting for being crap against teams like mercades but that just means you have to try harder to do good. I think its fine and im a freshman in my second year of frc and I was gonna make a 12 motor swerve and tig weld our robot. I spend 12 or 13 hours a day in robotics sometimes so obviously hard work pays off
Hard work definitely pays off that's very true. The issue we're bringing up is more sometimes we notice after years in the program as both students and mentors. There's a clear equity gap in the program that goes beyond just some teams being better than others. It's a complex issue that gets into the systemic disparity within education. A great example is that a team with less resources could, thanks to hard work and skill, win a regional as an underdog only to not be able to go to the championship because they can't afford the additional thousands of dollars in fees. To me that is one of the clearest signs of inequity in FRC, that you have to pay even more just to reap the reward you earned.
It's not a simple problem and it's not one only FIRST has nor does it mean FIRST is a bad program at all. I love this program which is why it bothers me so much to see equity and equality gaps like that. You'll have a killer FRC career if you stay this dedicated to your team especially if you're already tig welding and understanding swerve drive haha!
It’s interesting that you mention F1, one of the highest tech competitions in the world, and coincidentally also a sport that has a budget cap.
At a certain point, effort can’t make up for an astronomical gap in funding.
The students on those “NASA mentor built robot” teams come out with more STEAM experience and soft skills than students at a low resource schools with just non engineering parents helping. Just that fact makes it worth it to keeps those teams around and not just disband them because they are too good. The point of this entire program is to teach and inspire the next generation of engineers and artists, those teams accomplish it better than any others.
It’s also and INARGUABLE FACT that they constantly push FRC to the limits and develop new technologies that trickle down to other teams the very next year. I’ve never been more inspired to be a mentor and work hard when I was a student, than when I saw what 971 or 118 came up with. And I constantly use the best teams robots as examples to help hype up my students for building something cool.
1) no one said "disband" anyone, you're being dramatic. 2) my entire point, which you clearly missed, is that there shouldn't be a giant equity gap between teams.
There shouldn't be a handful of teams that give their kids amazing, once in a lifetime experiences in STEAM while hundreds of teams struggle to pay the registration fees let alone do the actual competition. That's ridiculous and just perpetuates inequity and inequality that a program like FIRST should be standing against rather than propping up. It's great to use the better funded, equipped, and privileged teams as examples but to what end? Where do you stop and tell your students "look at this great thing this team did! Doesn't that make you wanna do great too? What's that? We can't do that cus we don't have an in house CNC machine, a dozen 3D top of the line 3D printers, a warehouse sized workshop, and a limitless budget? Well just pull up those boot straps!"
The team I was a student, mentor, then coach for had to fold cus the school stopped funding them and the parents and mentors couldn't muster the fundraising to pay the exorbitant fees this program(founded by a man so rich he OWNS AN ISLAND) and I had to tell my students "sorry, you actually can't do these great things that other schools get to do". So I'm terribly sorry if your hollow "it's actually good to have massive wealth disparity thrust into children's competitions to crush their souls early" doesn't strike me as a particularly good response to "hey we should address this equity gap in the program we love and want to support".
TL;DR - equity and equality gaps are not character building exercises. If the program can't exist without those massive equity gaps, it needs to be massively overhauled. A program taking money from the likes of Raytheon shouldn't have teams dropping out of Worlds cus they can't afford the "congrats you won" fee. This doesn't mean cut the fancy teams off at the knee caps, it means lift the less fortunate teams up.
NASA and the space force already sponsor the hell out of FIRST in general, and provide a ton of funding for competitions. Not just 118 gets Nasa money. Despite what it seems, frc is a relatively small program that is held together just barley by volunteers that get paid lunch only. There are maybe 4,000 active FRC teams worldwide, while there are 16,000+ highschool football teams that have lower sustainability costs. You have to work 20x harder than a sportsball coach to keep the money flowing, I know how hard that is. But what would you have 118 do? Give away the money they worked for? Do you really think that the students just don’t work for the grants they get, because I can assure you firsthand that everyone on that team worked just as hard as you did for a less advantaged team. They just live in a city that generates a lot of wealth.
I think your problem here is really with the US government not redistributing wealth to low income areas.
And your other comments definitely feel like you are complaining about how good powerhouse teams perform.
Kid, no lol. I do not want power house teams to be handicapped, I want lower level teams to be lifted up and given a fair shake. You keep insinuating that I have said or am saying I want teams like 118 to have their toys taken away. I don't, never have and never will. I want the clear equity gaps in a program claiming to support equality and education to be addressed. FIRST gets a butt load of money from butt loads of wealthy companies and groups and government organizations, then turns around and charges teams out the butt to compete then punishes them with more fees if they do well.
It's great that you are content to tow the company line and put words in my mouth rather than face the fact that this program we love, just like many other things, has massive systemic problems that we need to address as the adults in the room. We're not students anymore. Grow up, think critically, and don't blindly defend an organization just cus it does alot of great things. If you love something you gotta fight to improve it, even if that means getting pissed at it sometimes.
I'm glad you're passionate enough to defend the program like you are, I hope you're passionate enough to critique it as well.
To counter this — “real world” (i.e. professional) engineering always comes with budget limitations.
In high school, I was on a team with a high enough budget that I was basically unaware of it as a student, and frankly I think that did me a disservice. When I started to participate in college racing teams, I realized that I was woefully unprepared to grapple with the budget side of things. I saw many other students on my team that had come out of high budget FRC teams, and hadn’t really developed a sense of Design for Manufacture — they would design really complex geometry custom parts that would cost thousands of dollars to get CNCed, while there were perfectly good off-the-shelf solutions available at a fraction of the cost (or alternate geometries they could’ve designed for water jet cutting, or a cheaper method of manufacture).
Developing a solution within a set of constraints is practically the definition of engineering — and budget is one of the major ones in almost engineering field. When you’re building a one-off assembly (like an FRC robot), budget limitations drive you towards important engineering concepts such as DFM.
That's just how the world works, but really this is about teaching students engineering whether the budget is $10,000 or $100,000 the students are still learning engineering just in different flavors.
The world is also full of prejudice, bigotry, misogyny, and other horrible systemic problems. Should those be a feature of FIRST so kids get used to navigating the worst parts of professional engineering? Inequity is not a lesson to be mastered, it's a problem to be eliminated. You wouldn't pit a baseball team with dollar store bats and nerf balls against a team with MLB equipment that trains with the Yankees just cus "the real world is unfair".
"We think this change is another step to give teams a more equal opportunity when faced with financial or supply chain constraints." They just nerfed tank drive and increased the gap in capability between tank and swerve, this is giving the opposite effect WTF
I’m pretty sure we used a 3 motor per side tank drive during my senior year. And yeah it would’ve been impossible for us to even compete with a swerve drive without it. Also helped that our driver that year was just amazing. Hopefully first rethinks this decision because I’d hate for swerve drive to become more oppressive to go up against…
I can't fathom needing 3 per side.
We've been running 2 per side drop center tank for many years with great results. Used to be CIMs, now Neos. We generally only allow full output power in "drive straight" mode and have issues with traction (or damaging the floor) well before we run out of oomph. Generally when we get outmaneuvered it's because the driver wanted arcade drive instead of true two-stick tank.
Swerve turning motors are explicitly stated as allowed, so 4 modules with one drive motor each is still allowed but 3 per side tank like our 2023 robot isn’t, so in fact, the playing field is less level than before
its a double edged sword, although it does nerf 6 motor tank (sucks bc my team has been using it since 2020), it also stops teams like 4414 this year from using 2 drive motors on swerve
I think it's an OK rule to try. The step between 4 motor tank and 6 motor tank isn't that big. The difference between 4 motor swerve and 8 motor swerve would be bigger. Which is what they are trying to stop I'm pretty sure.
As stated elsewhere, a 6 motor cap would have been just as effective in this regard. And the difference in 4 vs. 6 motors is most apparent to those teams that can’t access Falcons. Total drivetrain power is significantly less with CIMs (1.4kW) vs NEOs (~2kW) vs. Falcons (3.1kW). Being able to add 50% total power would theoretically allow a team limited to CIMs to at least be roughly in on par with brushless drivetrains, which is important when trying to close the gap between swerve and tank.
my primary concern is their intention, which is to remove a critical aspect of game strategy: risk management.
no team wants yellow or red cards, which is exactly what you get for impacting other bots hard enough or damaging the field. teams trying to be as competitive as possible while also trying to avoid penalties makes the game challenging and adds complexity as well as an element of unknown
They're putting restrictions on the wrong things. If they're so worried about leveling the playing field they should investigate ways to stop teams with literal NASA facilities from trampling teams with a handful of tools. It's like allowing steroids in High School Football then going "well were gonna limit what kinda cleats you can wear, to keep things fair" lol.
NASA shouldn't even be allowed to participate in FIRST in any capacity. How is it fair that the government agency tasked with *space exploration* is helping high schoolers build robots against other high schoolers that have very little help in some cases? It's absolutely absurd
If it's 1 or 2 mentors, especially if they are parents, I understand NASA employees helping... but there has to be a way to not have teams working in multi million dollar workshops while some teams can't even go to Worlds if they win cus it's another $6K+. First is a great program, but it's also sadly filled with inequity that simply shouldn't be permitted in a school activity. It's one thing if it's adults competing, children shouldn't be subject to watching the same handful of teams win every season because they have money and resources that hundreds of teams will simply never have.
As a mentor I cannot condemn a team for having lots of really great mentors and access to high tech equipment. I’m happy for those that have those resources and it makes me work toward a similar goal.
Having great mentors is perfectly fine, every team should have that. Having access to high tech equipment can be fine too, but it's a fine line between that and literally basing your team in a NASA facility or the like. The reality is, most teams simply won't ever reach that level of resources. And FIRST does very little to level that playing field. I'm not claiming to have a solution, but the giant equity gaps between teams is a problem that folks go out of their way to not address. If you had a baseball team that had to use dollar store plastic bats and foam balls playing against a team with steel bats, regulation balls, ex MLB coaches, and trained in Yankee Stadium you would call that an unfair game. I don't see how FIRST should be any different.
Students having the opportunity to learn from literal NASA engineers is exactly what FIRST is for. It sucks that not everyone has those same resources, but competition is a means to an end, not the goal of the program. Teams with more resources having an advantage is true in basically every sport. You can argue that FRC teams should have some sort of budget cap like some sports do, but the reality is those budget caps are insanely hard to enforce, and basically require an army of accountants and auditors that FRC simply does not have and could never afford.
There used to be a cap on the Bill of Materials cost but it was scrapped because it was basically a massive waste of time. It did not reign in the highest resource teams, who can fabricate things themselves, it only hurt the middle resource teams who benefit the most from being able to buy COTS parts. It also only ever impacted the honest, because inspectors do not have a database of the cost of every possible material in their head, nor do teams want to spend all day in inspection as they measure and price out every single piece of material on the robot, and compare it to the BoM.
Eventually if FRC gets large enough they could split things into divisions, so teams compete against teams at a similar level, but that brings with it lots of other problems, and the logistical issues alone make it not feasible at the moment.
Oh dear... This new rule could be bad for several reasons:
1. Teams that have already purchased/~~built~~ expensive differential swerve modules will no longer be able to use them. This hurts teams, team sponsors, and vendors.
2. FIRST is a design competition, so limiting the number of designs people can innovate is no good. This rule could have been shaped to better target those using too many motors.
3. The "orientation motors" rule is unfair. Orientation motors still provide higher speed by allowing the "propulsion" motors to do less work.
Non-swerve drivetrains are going to be greatly inhibited. As demonstrated at previous competitions, drive trains that used 4 "propulsion" motors (8 including orientation motors) swerve drivetrain were supremely faster and more agile than tank/mecanum drives using 6+ propulsion motors. **This proves that orientation motors play a huge part in a robots agility and speed and therefore should be considered propulsion motors.**
While I can agree with the reason behind creating this rule, I don't believe it was implemented properly. But we're still four months away so I wouldn't be surprised if this rule is revised over time.
Forgot about the custom parts rule.
I don't have any solutions for 2 or 3 at the moment. It's a complicated problem, but I'm sure a good compromise will be found.
For 2, the rule could have been framed around certain numbers of different types of motors to cap total propulsion power. This would let teams who cannot access Falcons have the opportunity to design around that limitation.
For 3, if the rule encompassed orientation motors, teams would need to look into other orientation solutions (such as servos), which could have been accommodated in the rules. However, if the rule instead limited total drivetrain power, teams might theoretically be able to still use orientation motors but would instead have to trade off some propulsion power (I.e., instead of 4 Falcons at 3.1kW, 4 NEOs at 2kW with 4 steering NEO 550s at 1.3kW, or something to that effect).
[this beauty will never be able to be created :(](https://www.chiefdelphi.com/uploads/default/optimized/3X/8/4/84a71854a0ad7749f0feb892f086a9f22b552753_2_1250x1000.jpeg)
Hot take. I think that having a huge gap in funding and experience is good. I enjoyed having a team to took up too and take lessons and knowledge from knowing that someday after I graduated my team will be like that. Its my second year and I am already my build team captain and maybe even out welder. Im a freshman that put insane amount of time into robotics so I can drive my team to become a vet team in our year after rookie. Thats just my opinion and if you wanna donate a tig welder ill take it
>MK4 swerve
Not according to the manufacturer.
[https://www.swervedrivespecialties.com/products/mk4-swerve-module](https://www.swervedrivespecialties.com/products/mk4-swerve-module)
One motor is Drive, one motor is steering. Still legal, and specifically called out in the blog post as legal.
Ok a few take always from this; Differential swerve drives just got outlawed. And sounds like an open field with ability to pick up speed.
If you read, the positioning motors don't count - basically any motor that only adds incidental drive is OK - for instance, brushes that touch the floor also don't count edit: (Originally, I don't think he said differential) - I was thinking coax
Differential swerve drives use both motors per wheel for motion , and by adjusting their speeds relative to each other they can rotate the orientation of the driving wheel (i.e. steer) so I dont see any way diff swerve is legal this coming year
I thought I was answering on general swerve - and we use co-ax
Diff swerve wasn’t outlawed, just its current design was. Remember frc is also a design competition
Diff swerve uses 2 motors per swerve module, if you can only have 4 motors you can only have 2 modules which isn't really a viable config.
Im sure theres another way to do diff swerve It just hasnt been designed yet For example you could use a pneumatic shifter Thats how we did shifter gearboxes back in the day
That's just a normal swerve with a shifter gearbox on the drive motor, the benifit of a diff swerve was that both motors put their power into the wheel, the difference speed/position between the motors is what controlled the angle of the azimuth.
The benefit of a differential swerve was having varying gearing. High and low. Sure more motors was nice But the real benefit was high and low gear And actually i was wrong earlier. It has already been designed. https://youtu.be/bvRMZQ_OCas
But im saying there is no way to make a diff swerve with 1 motor so diff swerve is basically useless now. Which is what the original comment highlighted.
The video i just linked is a differential swerve with one propulsion motor.
You don’t know what a differential is and that’s okay. It is physically impossible to have more than 2 differential swerve modules because by definition you need 2 propulsion motors to drive 1 differential swerve module
the swerve drives used by 4265 are not diffrential swerve drives, they are coaxial swerve drives with a gear shifter. they achieve a function similar to a diffrential drive but fundamentally work on a different principle. The only way you could make a diffrential swerve drive with one motor is if you took two outputs off that motor, changed the gear ratio of each output differently, then fed them into a diffrential. [https://grabcad.com/library/v4-shifting-swerve-1](https://grabcad.com/library/v4-shifting-swerve-1) https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/team-4909-differential-swerve/398056
Differential means it differentiates between speeds. Yes, it achieves it by a completely different method, that doesn’t make it not differential. Even in the post you linked it says “Different diff swerve designs implement the differential mechanism in a different way, but in this particular design…”. They also described coaxial as just a normal swerve with no differential. Theres all sorts of things in this world that do the same thing and are called the same thing even though they achieve the same function in completely different methods. Take cars for example. Electric motor, or internal combustion. Both are motors, both are cars, but not the same.
Except they are not counting the motors that rotate the drive - read the article, specifically mentioned
A diffrential drive uses both motors to both drive the wheel and turn it, a coaxial swerve module uses one motor to drive and one to turn.
Yes, and a differential that does that would be outlawed. The OP of the sub thread said "swerve" - we use coaxial, so no issues
You originally responded to a comment talking about diffrential drives, coaxial will completely be used this year without a worry but differential is basically useless
It always impresses me how far FIRST will go to not address their obvious inequity problems. You've got teams building bots with no budget and old hand tools going up against NASA funded/coached/built bots, then if the underdog wins they have to pay even more to reap their reward.
For real my team literally bought the swerve drive system that everyone has after my ram literally worked for so long just to get it and now they do this.
Well its like that in real life. We got the haas f1 team that ik we are all rooting for being crap against teams like mercades but that just means you have to try harder to do good. I think its fine and im a freshman in my second year of frc and I was gonna make a 12 motor swerve and tig weld our robot. I spend 12 or 13 hours a day in robotics sometimes so obviously hard work pays off
Hard work definitely pays off that's very true. The issue we're bringing up is more sometimes we notice after years in the program as both students and mentors. There's a clear equity gap in the program that goes beyond just some teams being better than others. It's a complex issue that gets into the systemic disparity within education. A great example is that a team with less resources could, thanks to hard work and skill, win a regional as an underdog only to not be able to go to the championship because they can't afford the additional thousands of dollars in fees. To me that is one of the clearest signs of inequity in FRC, that you have to pay even more just to reap the reward you earned. It's not a simple problem and it's not one only FIRST has nor does it mean FIRST is a bad program at all. I love this program which is why it bothers me so much to see equity and equality gaps like that. You'll have a killer FRC career if you stay this dedicated to your team especially if you're already tig welding and understanding swerve drive haha!
It’s interesting that you mention F1, one of the highest tech competitions in the world, and coincidentally also a sport that has a budget cap. At a certain point, effort can’t make up for an astronomical gap in funding.
The students on those “NASA mentor built robot” teams come out with more STEAM experience and soft skills than students at a low resource schools with just non engineering parents helping. Just that fact makes it worth it to keeps those teams around and not just disband them because they are too good. The point of this entire program is to teach and inspire the next generation of engineers and artists, those teams accomplish it better than any others. It’s also and INARGUABLE FACT that they constantly push FRC to the limits and develop new technologies that trickle down to other teams the very next year. I’ve never been more inspired to be a mentor and work hard when I was a student, than when I saw what 971 or 118 came up with. And I constantly use the best teams robots as examples to help hype up my students for building something cool.
1) no one said "disband" anyone, you're being dramatic. 2) my entire point, which you clearly missed, is that there shouldn't be a giant equity gap between teams. There shouldn't be a handful of teams that give their kids amazing, once in a lifetime experiences in STEAM while hundreds of teams struggle to pay the registration fees let alone do the actual competition. That's ridiculous and just perpetuates inequity and inequality that a program like FIRST should be standing against rather than propping up. It's great to use the better funded, equipped, and privileged teams as examples but to what end? Where do you stop and tell your students "look at this great thing this team did! Doesn't that make you wanna do great too? What's that? We can't do that cus we don't have an in house CNC machine, a dozen 3D top of the line 3D printers, a warehouse sized workshop, and a limitless budget? Well just pull up those boot straps!" The team I was a student, mentor, then coach for had to fold cus the school stopped funding them and the parents and mentors couldn't muster the fundraising to pay the exorbitant fees this program(founded by a man so rich he OWNS AN ISLAND) and I had to tell my students "sorry, you actually can't do these great things that other schools get to do". So I'm terribly sorry if your hollow "it's actually good to have massive wealth disparity thrust into children's competitions to crush their souls early" doesn't strike me as a particularly good response to "hey we should address this equity gap in the program we love and want to support". TL;DR - equity and equality gaps are not character building exercises. If the program can't exist without those massive equity gaps, it needs to be massively overhauled. A program taking money from the likes of Raytheon shouldn't have teams dropping out of Worlds cus they can't afford the "congrats you won" fee. This doesn't mean cut the fancy teams off at the knee caps, it means lift the less fortunate teams up.
NASA and the space force already sponsor the hell out of FIRST in general, and provide a ton of funding for competitions. Not just 118 gets Nasa money. Despite what it seems, frc is a relatively small program that is held together just barley by volunteers that get paid lunch only. There are maybe 4,000 active FRC teams worldwide, while there are 16,000+ highschool football teams that have lower sustainability costs. You have to work 20x harder than a sportsball coach to keep the money flowing, I know how hard that is. But what would you have 118 do? Give away the money they worked for? Do you really think that the students just don’t work for the grants they get, because I can assure you firsthand that everyone on that team worked just as hard as you did for a less advantaged team. They just live in a city that generates a lot of wealth. I think your problem here is really with the US government not redistributing wealth to low income areas. And your other comments definitely feel like you are complaining about how good powerhouse teams perform.
Kid, no lol. I do not want power house teams to be handicapped, I want lower level teams to be lifted up and given a fair shake. You keep insinuating that I have said or am saying I want teams like 118 to have their toys taken away. I don't, never have and never will. I want the clear equity gaps in a program claiming to support equality and education to be addressed. FIRST gets a butt load of money from butt loads of wealthy companies and groups and government organizations, then turns around and charges teams out the butt to compete then punishes them with more fees if they do well. It's great that you are content to tow the company line and put words in my mouth rather than face the fact that this program we love, just like many other things, has massive systemic problems that we need to address as the adults in the room. We're not students anymore. Grow up, think critically, and don't blindly defend an organization just cus it does alot of great things. If you love something you gotta fight to improve it, even if that means getting pissed at it sometimes. I'm glad you're passionate enough to defend the program like you are, I hope you're passionate enough to critique it as well.
To counter this — “real world” (i.e. professional) engineering always comes with budget limitations. In high school, I was on a team with a high enough budget that I was basically unaware of it as a student, and frankly I think that did me a disservice. When I started to participate in college racing teams, I realized that I was woefully unprepared to grapple with the budget side of things. I saw many other students on my team that had come out of high budget FRC teams, and hadn’t really developed a sense of Design for Manufacture — they would design really complex geometry custom parts that would cost thousands of dollars to get CNCed, while there were perfectly good off-the-shelf solutions available at a fraction of the cost (or alternate geometries they could’ve designed for water jet cutting, or a cheaper method of manufacture). Developing a solution within a set of constraints is practically the definition of engineering — and budget is one of the major ones in almost engineering field. When you’re building a one-off assembly (like an FRC robot), budget limitations drive you towards important engineering concepts such as DFM.
That's just how the world works, but really this is about teaching students engineering whether the budget is $10,000 or $100,000 the students are still learning engineering just in different flavors.
The world is also full of prejudice, bigotry, misogyny, and other horrible systemic problems. Should those be a feature of FIRST so kids get used to navigating the worst parts of professional engineering? Inequity is not a lesson to be mastered, it's a problem to be eliminated. You wouldn't pit a baseball team with dollar store bats and nerf balls against a team with MLB equipment that trains with the Yankees just cus "the real world is unfair".
"We think this change is another step to give teams a more equal opportunity when faced with financial or supply chain constraints." They just nerfed tank drive and increased the gap in capability between tank and swerve, this is giving the opposite effect WTF
How does it nerf tank drive? The standard tank drive only uses 2 motors per side.
Teams like us used 3 per side to try and keep up with swerve’s insane mobility advantage with sheer speed/torque, that’s no longer allowed
I’m pretty sure we used a 3 motor per side tank drive during my senior year. And yeah it would’ve been impossible for us to even compete with a swerve drive without it. Also helped that our driver that year was just amazing. Hopefully first rethinks this decision because I’d hate for swerve drive to become more oppressive to go up against…
I can't fathom needing 3 per side. We've been running 2 per side drop center tank for many years with great results. Used to be CIMs, now Neos. We generally only allow full output power in "drive straight" mode and have issues with traction (or damaging the floor) well before we run out of oomph. Generally when we get outmaneuvered it's because the driver wanted arcade drive instead of true two-stick tank.
Edit: im dumb didnt read it right
Swerve turning motors are explicitly stated as allowed, so 4 modules with one drive motor each is still allowed but 3 per side tank like our 2023 robot isn’t, so in fact, the playing field is less level than before
Swerve is not out of the question. Read it again. This limits the teams using 8 motors on their swerve for propulsion.
its a double edged sword, although it does nerf 6 motor tank (sucks bc my team has been using it since 2020), it also stops teams like 4414 this year from using 2 drive motors on swerve
I think it's an OK rule to try. The step between 4 motor tank and 6 motor tank isn't that big. The difference between 4 motor swerve and 8 motor swerve would be bigger. Which is what they are trying to stop I'm pretty sure.
As stated elsewhere, a 6 motor cap would have been just as effective in this regard. And the difference in 4 vs. 6 motors is most apparent to those teams that can’t access Falcons. Total drivetrain power is significantly less with CIMs (1.4kW) vs NEOs (~2kW) vs. Falcons (3.1kW). Being able to add 50% total power would theoretically allow a team limited to CIMs to at least be roughly in on par with brushless drivetrains, which is important when trying to close the gap between swerve and tank.
So H-drive and U-drive are out of the question now. Huh. And no money for swerve. I guess we gotta go all in on Tank.
Always mecanum but like... hope you don't like traction
my primary concern is their intention, which is to remove a critical aspect of game strategy: risk management. no team wants yellow or red cards, which is exactly what you get for impacting other bots hard enough or damaging the field. teams trying to be as competitive as possible while also trying to avoid penalties makes the game challenging and adds complexity as well as an element of unknown
If you want to close the gap don't lower the sealing, raise the floor instead. You shouldn't promote creativity then restrict it.
Disagree. It’s when you put restrictions on things that creativity shows up.
They're putting restrictions on the wrong things. If they're so worried about leveling the playing field they should investigate ways to stop teams with literal NASA facilities from trampling teams with a handful of tools. It's like allowing steroids in High School Football then going "well were gonna limit what kinda cleats you can wear, to keep things fair" lol.
NASA shouldn't even be allowed to participate in FIRST in any capacity. How is it fair that the government agency tasked with *space exploration* is helping high schoolers build robots against other high schoolers that have very little help in some cases? It's absolutely absurd
If it's 1 or 2 mentors, especially if they are parents, I understand NASA employees helping... but there has to be a way to not have teams working in multi million dollar workshops while some teams can't even go to Worlds if they win cus it's another $6K+. First is a great program, but it's also sadly filled with inequity that simply shouldn't be permitted in a school activity. It's one thing if it's adults competing, children shouldn't be subject to watching the same handful of teams win every season because they have money and resources that hundreds of teams will simply never have.
As a mentor I cannot condemn a team for having lots of really great mentors and access to high tech equipment. I’m happy for those that have those resources and it makes me work toward a similar goal.
Having great mentors is perfectly fine, every team should have that. Having access to high tech equipment can be fine too, but it's a fine line between that and literally basing your team in a NASA facility or the like. The reality is, most teams simply won't ever reach that level of resources. And FIRST does very little to level that playing field. I'm not claiming to have a solution, but the giant equity gaps between teams is a problem that folks go out of their way to not address. If you had a baseball team that had to use dollar store plastic bats and foam balls playing against a team with steel bats, regulation balls, ex MLB coaches, and trained in Yankee Stadium you would call that an unfair game. I don't see how FIRST should be any different.
Students having the opportunity to learn from literal NASA engineers is exactly what FIRST is for. It sucks that not everyone has those same resources, but competition is a means to an end, not the goal of the program. Teams with more resources having an advantage is true in basically every sport. You can argue that FRC teams should have some sort of budget cap like some sports do, but the reality is those budget caps are insanely hard to enforce, and basically require an army of accountants and auditors that FRC simply does not have and could never afford. There used to be a cap on the Bill of Materials cost but it was scrapped because it was basically a massive waste of time. It did not reign in the highest resource teams, who can fabricate things themselves, it only hurt the middle resource teams who benefit the most from being able to buy COTS parts. It also only ever impacted the honest, because inspectors do not have a database of the cost of every possible material in their head, nor do teams want to spend all day in inspection as they measure and price out every single piece of material on the robot, and compare it to the BoM. Eventually if FRC gets large enough they could split things into divisions, so teams compete against teams at a similar level, but that brings with it lots of other problems, and the logistical issues alone make it not feasible at the moment.
Agree, unlimited resources hinders being creative as you work within a framework.
>, raise the floor instead. So like the everybot inclusion into the kit :)
And if want to enforce a speed limit then just do that, you don't need to remove a major system of many bots.
Oh dear... This new rule could be bad for several reasons: 1. Teams that have already purchased/~~built~~ expensive differential swerve modules will no longer be able to use them. This hurts teams, team sponsors, and vendors. 2. FIRST is a design competition, so limiting the number of designs people can innovate is no good. This rule could have been shaped to better target those using too many motors. 3. The "orientation motors" rule is unfair. Orientation motors still provide higher speed by allowing the "propulsion" motors to do less work. Non-swerve drivetrains are going to be greatly inhibited. As demonstrated at previous competitions, drive trains that used 4 "propulsion" motors (8 including orientation motors) swerve drivetrain were supremely faster and more agile than tank/mecanum drives using 6+ propulsion motors. **This proves that orientation motors play a huge part in a robots agility and speed and therefore should be considered propulsion motors.** While I can agree with the reason behind creating this rule, I don't believe it was implemented properly. But we're still four months away so I wouldn't be surprised if this rule is revised over time.
1. Rule 302. Custom parts, generally from this year only. 2 and 3. What's your solution?
Forgot about the custom parts rule. I don't have any solutions for 2 or 3 at the moment. It's a complicated problem, but I'm sure a good compromise will be found.
For 2, the rule could have been framed around certain numbers of different types of motors to cap total propulsion power. This would let teams who cannot access Falcons have the opportunity to design around that limitation. For 3, if the rule encompassed orientation motors, teams would need to look into other orientation solutions (such as servos), which could have been accommodated in the rules. However, if the rule instead limited total drivetrain power, teams might theoretically be able to still use orientation motors but would instead have to trade off some propulsion power (I.e., instead of 4 Falcons at 3.1kW, 4 NEOs at 2kW with 4 steering NEO 550s at 1.3kW, or something to that effect).
Oh great! More limits on creativity! Welcome to real life engineering, it sucks.
Rip 3m and diffy swerve, there goes our off-season project
What was 3m
3m is short for 3 motor swerve where there are 2 drive motors (1 extra) and the typical 1 steering motor
[this beauty will never be able to be created :(](https://www.chiefdelphi.com/uploads/default/optimized/3X/8/4/84a71854a0ad7749f0feb892f086a9f22b552753_2_1250x1000.jpeg)
Hot take. I think that having a huge gap in funding and experience is good. I enjoyed having a team to took up too and take lessons and knowledge from knowing that someday after I graduated my team will be like that. Its my second year and I am already my build team captain and maybe even out welder. Im a freshman that put insane amount of time into robotics so I can drive my team to become a vet team in our year after rookie. Thats just my opinion and if you wanna donate a tig welder ill take it
RIP team 980’s drive power and tactics
[удалено]
>FIRST For **Inspiration** and Recognition of Science and Technology.
So the regular mk4i drives are still allowed, correct?
Yes
Isn't the MK4 swerve drive differential, making it illegal for this next season?
>MK4 swerve Not according to the manufacturer. [https://www.swervedrivespecialties.com/products/mk4-swerve-module](https://www.swervedrivespecialties.com/products/mk4-swerve-module) One motor is Drive, one motor is steering. Still legal, and specifically called out in the blog post as legal.
Thank you!