Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Just an input, we've done this for the last two years and it's 1.) AWESOME if you have a big team do keep them busy, 2.) great practice, 3.) perfectly legal, but 4.) takes time... as in finish the real robot first, then build this one along the way or even after if you can! We've made the mistake on working on both simultaneously and not focusing on the real one as much as we could have!

Good luck!

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

We've been building a practice robot for at least 3 years (including this one). We should be almost (if not completely finished) with our practice robot by the end of this week to the beginning of next week.

It shows off any flaws that may come out in a design before the competition, so you have time to improve it. Additionally, your drivers will thank you for it.

It is definitely something to seriously consider.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

A practice bot is always a good idea, if time and resources allow. This year we set up an old chassis with a 6 wheel drive like we plan on using. We are using an old VEX robot controller and RC 2 joystick controller to complete the mix. Granted we won't have all the functionality of our comp bot, but for driver practice it will work well.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

This year we're actually working on three robots: a prototype robot, a practice robot, and the competition robot.

The prototype robot was assembled, wired, and programmed entirely on our first meeting out of Kitbot parts and serves two purposes: give the programming team time to figure out sensors, drive code, autonomous, etc on a real robot, and provide a modular base chassis for us to prototype mechanism ideas on. Prototypes mounted on it have been built out of Kitbot parts, 80/20 parts, Vex parts, and whatever else we have lying around.

After all of the subsystems have been proven using prototypes on the prototype robot, we then move onto designing the entire final robot in SolidWorks. Once the design is done, we split up all the parts to a variety of different sources, including sponsors and our team machine shop, so we can have parts back faster. We also do this to incorporate a number of different fabrication techniques, to show our students different ways ideas can become reality.

Once the parts have been made, we assemble the functionally identical practice and competition robots almost concurrently, although the competition robot usually lags behind the practice robot by a few days due to powder-coating lead times.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Our team builds two robots every year. First we build a prototype bot, this is usually finished by week 3, 3 and a half. After we build this bot we use what we learned from building it to build a "flight bot" that we send to the competition. This flight bot is much easier to build because we know exactly what to do. After ship date we use the prototype bot for driver practice. Having a practice bot (and extra driver practice) before regionals is absolutely game changing. I strongly recommend you build one if possible.