Quote:
Originally Posted by BJC
I'll try to give what little knowledge I have regarding design..
1. Figure out what your design goals are before anyone comes up with any designs. It is natural to immidiatly begin to jump to the idea stage after being presented with a problem. Refrain from this, redefine and specify the problem.
2. Make a list of priorities based on your redefined problem. A list of priorities in 2011 for tube hanging would have been: -drive around -aquire tube -get tube into scoring position -release tube Notice how being able to release a tube is useless without being able to effectivly aquire one. Thus aquiring comes first. Many teams fall into the trap of mixing up their priorities and end up with a robot that can't effectively play the game as a result.
3. Refine your problem again. Ok done? Now do it again. This is the most important part of the process. Even the best designed robot performs poorly if its solving the wrong problem.
4. At this point it's time to break out the Weighted Objective Tables. Yaaay! But seriously, use them, they help prevent "my-own-design-is-the-best-osis" and often make seemingly close and difficult choices obvious. USE THEM!
5. At this point you hopefully have a design thought out. Now go and make sure that your still staying true to the origional problem you defined. It probably isn't; fix it so it is. The design will become simpler as a result--that's a good thing.
6. Alright, your done! You have a successful design. Just kidding! Now do this again three times.
Doing these things as a team makes for a very successful robot. Good Luck!
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This is pretty good, but it's missing one important step and that is to do what you keep saying not to do throughout these steps. After you're done saying that it's not time to put up designs right now we're trying to find what we're doing....you need to put up designs. I feel like every year our team has tried to follow exactly these 6 steps and what we end up forgetting is what is missing from these steps, after you know what you are doing you need to figure out how you're going to do it. And it is because we don't get to the how of things as a group that most people are kept out of the loop of what is really going on with the robot outside of their sub-project, communication is key.
Design is something that people say they want to finish within a couple days or 2 weeks of build season, but that is completely insane. Design isn't done till the robot is done, actually it's still not done then. After that you need to figure out what is wrong with you're robot and fix that too, because design is repeated over and over. It's the whole Design->Build->Break loop that continues until your boss says we need to start making this product ("shoot the engineer"), or in our case competition day (and then after that for many teams the next and next and next competition).
Although what you're referring to is how do we do this initial design. For this, at least for FIRST, you need to figure out what is your goal during the competition....well to win of course (and have fun and learn too). How do you win? There are numerous ways and first you have to narrow down what you're focus is (well most teams will have to do this some teams can do everything, but for most teams just remember "jack of all trades, ace of none"), develop a strategy, how are you going to play the game. Find what kind of strategies will be effective in the game and decide what your path will be, and it may not be what you want to do, but instead think what you should do, what could you're team do best.
For example this year 2228 kept most of our focus on building a robot that we thought would be able to score on all pegs. But anyone who was at FLR noticed that half the time we never moved our arm, it was zip tied down, because every time we tried to use it the thing broke and we were out for the match. Instead we focused on defense, until the last 40 seconds when we lined up for the minibot. The minibot in our initial design meetings was shunned. The mentors wanted nothing to do with it, but being the captain of a local FTC team I made sure we kept it as an option and even though it was our last priority we did it and it's what got us into the finals.
Next once you have figured out what you want to do, often there are several different things and like it was said earlier you need to prioritize these objectives. Weighted Objective Tables are great for this, in most people's opinions I'm not a fan, but they must work if everyone loves them....right? Now that you have you're objectives find out how you're going to accomplish them. This is where you get to have the fun of busting out different designs that you've been formulating ever since the first 5 seconds of the game animation. Then look at these different designs and find out which will be best (Weighted Objective Tables again). Now you should have a basic idea of the robot collage, what's it going to be. Once you have this start to fit together the pieces and make you're finer dimensions.....I hope this helped shed some light on the process, but all I can say is that no matter how you plan, or plan not to design the robot it's not going to work out the way you thought. You have a bunch of teenagers in a room trying to collaborate and they're going to find a way to mess up you're plan (trust me I'm one of them). Just go with the flow and try to stay on track, keep things productive and have fun with it.