Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

Our team Built the Practice Robot first (Made sure to CAD Design the Whole thing while we were doing it) Then as people were Building the Competition Robot the last few weeks we were still able to make modifications to the real robot/use the Practice Robot for Driver Practice. This way we could figure out all of the problems our robot had and hopefully correct them before our Competition Robot was fully Built. Plus it gives the Programmers time to work out any kinks there may be.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

Next season, Our team is thinking about building two nearly identical robots. Our thoughts were that the Juniors and Seniors would build the "Competition Bot" and the Freshmen and Sophomores would copy/replicate what the Juniors and Seniors are Building. Do you think this is a viable way of training in the under-classmen while at the same time, creating a duplicate robot.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

If you're set on building them in parallel, I think you might be better off having a group of juniors and seniors leading freshmen and sophomores for each build. That way you have a more experienced group helping with the build of both bots, and any issues you run into with either build can be troubleshot and solved more readily.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

We go the other way - when we make build groups, we integrate the underclassmen/rookies into the same groups with the upperclassmen/veterans. In just a few years, we have built up a self-sustaining culture of near-peer mentoring to supplement the "adult mentoring".

Also, we find that having the same group build two copies of something results in less re-work and closer clones than having two different groups each build one.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

We built our practice bot first out of steel parts, because one of our mentors could get those for us as soon as the cad was finished. We then built our main bot our of higher tolerance aluminium parts. We though that we were going to have to keep the steel bot as our practice bot because it would be to heavy (it wasn't), but we wanted to have more add on room so we used the aluminium bot for competition.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

We build them in parallel, but generally neglect the practice bot as bag and tag gets closer. We give a bit of a lead on the practice to sort out any design bugs that we inevitably run into, but again, as we often run out of time, we don't want to have wildly different robots after we bag.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

This year we went with a cheaper and easier approach and only made only one set of manipulators that include the catapult, arms, and harvester. The only thing we have two sets of is the drivetrain, electronics, and manipulator mounts. Altogether our manipulators weigh very little and were able to swap what we needed depending on what we were focused on. For bag day, we kept the harvester, catapult and manipulator arms and took it in as withholding for our first event. From there we took the harvester, catapult, and newly made scaling mechanism, refined that, and then took them to Vegas for our withholding. In order to reduce workload at champs, we left our climber and manipulator arms on and only took the harvester and catapult back for refinement and practice. Altogether, we think we can put the harvester and catapult back on in an hour once we get to St Louis. We think we will probably go this way every year since the workload is much less and have less to worry about in regards to differences between the practice and competition bot.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

This is a great way to manage robot revisions while staying on a budget.

I advise a majority of teams to buy two kit bot frames and move mechanisms like you described.

Thanks for the input.

-Mike

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

+1 to this

For our 2015 robot we did the same thing and it helped a ton with continuity between our practice bot and our competition bot. Having mechanisms be modular and easy to remove helps with this. In essence you are getting 30+ more hours with the essential components of your robot before and between competition, which you can break and improve at your own leisure. It helped the team I was on at the time improve substantially between competitions.

Put shortly you don't deal with the same gremlins you worked out at home when you get to comp, because they were already worked out at home.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

++ It wasn't really what we intended, but is essentially what we've done the past two years. We didn't do it so much to save money as manage our time.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

we have an odd process for building our practice robot
1) build Chassis V1
2) work out redesign of chassis based on info from our device design that is nearing completion
3) build chassis V2 (final one)
4) mount final devices to final chassis
5) mount a remake of the final devices onto Chassis V1

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

This year we kind of just winged it and went ahead and built the main frame and such for the practice robot right from the start from old parts and had that done and wired up in about a week. Then we had the shooter mechanism caded up and we built that. We had a fully working practice bot by week 3 or 4 I think, and after everything looked good we built our final bot which was kind of the same minus some major changes to the electronics board and some different materials.

The biggest difference was the big lifting pistons was not on the practice bot, and during competition we found that it was way harder to pick up balls with the pistons on.

tbh the practice bot in my opinion is more of a prototyping robot instead of a bot that you would do a lot of practicing on unless it is the exact same.

Re: How do you make your second robot?
 

I'll elaborate: prior to this year, we never built our practice bot with the explicit intention of making it identical to the competition robot. That is, the two machines would have similar mechanisms, but the practice bot might have components made from wood instead of aluminum, it might use illegal motors, pneumatic cylinder geometry might be different, etc.

The problem with that approach is that you actually have to design two robots. If you don't make a concerted effort to keep the two machines as similar as possible, you will have to solve an entirely different set of problems for each robot to get it to work. And any amount of time you spend solving problems on your practice robot that don't apply to your competition robot is time you're not using to make your competition robot better. This defeats one of the main benefits of building two robots. It might be counterintuitive, but you build a better robot and save time if you go straight to designing your competition robot, rather than spending too much time on a "prototype" version first.

Having learned this lesson the hard way, we went into build season this year with the intention of building two robots to be basically identical. One of the main problems our team struggles with is consistent craftsmanship, and a key way we mitigated that this season was by making corresponding parts for each robot at roughly the same time. For the most part, we would build a part or mechanism for the practice robot, and after verifying that our methods were sound, we would immediately build a second copy for the competition robot. This helped ensure the same sets of hands were responsible for both copies of a part, which in turn helped ensure uniformity between the two machines.

In reality it didn't always go as smoothly as that, but those are the basic details. I think I can safely say having a nearly-identical practice robot was a big factor in making this our most competitive season so far. If you have any other questions I'd be happy to tell you more about our process.