They don’t have unlimited motors. And in FRC not every motor is equal (even if they physically are). There are several factors:
- The number of slots on the Power Distribution Panel (16x, if you’re running nothing else through the PDP)
- The size of the circuit breaker behind the motor (the PDP only has 8x 40A slots and the rest can be as high as 30A). This means that if you used all the same motor, a motor on a 30A breaker has a lower ceiling than a motor on a 40A breaker.
- The amount of power the battery can output. Motors in FRC have gotten more and more power hungry, while the battery has effectively been the same for nearly 30 years. If you ran 16x motors on an FRC robot at the same time, you will start to hit the limits of what the battery is capable of producing. Also keep in mind that the FRC control system will brownout once Vbat dips under 6VDC.
There’s a lot of technical reasons why teams would want to run pneumatics, but they’re still trending away from it.