[Daniel Brim]

As the design lead for the elevator system and the roller claw system on our robot this year, I figured I'd put in my two cents. Especially since both systems are very heavily "inspired" by other past (and even current) designs.

As I posted in the photo this year, our elevator system is very heavily inspired by 254/968 in 2007. I wouldn't call it a clone by any means, but the fact remains that the initial round of design still belongs to them.

That said, I do think that a lot of valuable design work and process was exposed to myself and our students when designing the system. A lot of the design depended on our team's resources, which are different than 254/968's. We can't exactly machine pulley mounts from aluminum billets on this team. We also made sure that the design was updated to suit this year's game.

When we design iterations on other's systems, I actually prefer not to look at their CAD. This is personal preference, but I feel like it's pretty easy to fall into the trap of designing for the wrong goals and the wrong game that way.

Our roller claw this year was designed and fabricated between ship and our competition last weekend. And yeah, I'll admit that certain inspirations are taken from designs for this year's game. For example, we implemented our own spin on 148's backstop idea, and it worked brilliantly in competition.

Doing a design post-ship wasn't exactly easy though. The way the elevator was set up made it pretty difficult to integrate the two systems together. It's still a valuable experience for the entire design team to work through a systems integration problem like the one we had with our claw. Our claw wasn't a direct copy of anybody's though, and I'm proud to say that.

Now that we have competed for the first time this year, there are a few things that we've learned about our design as a team. If we had just carbon copied another design, the learning process would become completely different. This way, we learn from our own mistakes, not from other's.