If you have any questions regarding the work breakdown between the two teams, feel free to ask.
We shared our work area at Ford and shared design decisions. They made their own frame, welded it, and assembled it. Their machine shop did all the pocketing and CNC machining because the extent of 1718's CNC's is... zero. That includes the stylish vertical tower. In return, we machined portions of the arm on our manual mill, and taught them to broach gears and do all the 'little' things. They did all their own wiring as well. In fact if you look at their electrical board it was 100% designed and completed by them.
Of course as a rookie team they leaned on us heavily for some things. 3D cad and other design work and the programming primarily.
Working together was a challenge. There was always a worry that we were being overbearing, or that they might have gone a different direction. We were constantly aware of that and tried to be extremely careful. I can't remember a single occasion where our team told them "you must do A". We strongly cautioned against some of the more common mistakes and they leveraged our experience, but never once did we dictate to them what they were going to do (indeed, I don't think they would have let us if we had tried
).
They had every opportunity to copy and use our version 2 minibot. After all, it was right in front of them, and we weren't keep any secrets. Instead, and hugely to their credit, they stuck with the one that THEY had been working on, finished it, and can claim 99% of the build for it. I think we may have made the aluminum 2" wheels. It's theirs.
In point of fact, if you look at the finish of the upper arm I think theirs looks nicer - they modified energy chain so that it folds both ways and used that route all their wiring and pneumatics. We led ours outside the arm in a bundle. There is a lot of each team in both designs, a fact we're understandably proud of.
If you look closely, you'll see a number of differences between the machines. The drivetrains are different, the hinge joints are different, the minibot deployments are completely different, as are the minibots themselves. If they're clones, they might as well be brother and sister because they aren't close to identical. I'll add, jealously, that their arm is far more stable than ours right now - we're going to be running substantially different gear ratios (by 30%) at states.
Next year they'll be moving to their own build facility (one conference room at Ford is too small for 40+ students). It's been a great ride so far!