[Chris_Elston]

As everyone has said, Sketchup is great for concepts. It's also great to check dimensional data very quickly, to see if it's possible.

I guess let me lead by example to show this off. Here are a couple of a concept sketches we made in the past seasons.

In 2010, there was a 3 inch rule, we wanted to quickly see what that meant so we used google sketchup to see a picture of what this rule looked like.

In 2011, the same with the 80 inch rule, several of us did not know if there was enough room to design a gripper, once again using sketchup to show it's gunna be ok...

In 2011, we wondered if a robot could fit between the mini-bot pole and wall and a few other things, again sketchup helped us see visually the design constraints and moved into CAD after that.

Credits: In the 2011 the field was drawn by someone else here at CD, we downloaded it and used it. Thank you who ever you are.