[Madison]

Here's the deal -- in the 'real world,' increasingly, the role of CAD team is played by the engineers responsible for the design of a product or system. It's becoming harder to find places that have dedicated drafters that have design dictated to them by someone else.

If your team wants to mimic an environment where the engineers are also documenting their design with CAD tools, then it is imperative that your drafters know what they're doing when it comes to mechanical design, design for manufacturability, etc. The 'build team' then builds what the designers have dictated.

If you want for the 'build team' to dictate design to the CAD team, they need to provide sufficient detail to the drafters so they can accurately reflect the build team's intent. This is only useful is CAD tools offer something useful for implementation -- drawings for machining, cutting, assembly, etc. Otherwise, using CAD to document a robot that was built off the cuff is worthless, in my opinion. Anytime you document a part after it's been manufactured, your process has failed.

On my team, I've been nearly single-handedly responsible for all CAD drafting for the last seven years. Sometimes, others will draw simple parts for our laser cutter, but many of those parts are represented first in my CAD model.

I use CAD to examine more detailed problems than prototyping practically can manage -- working out geometry of moving parts, packaging of things so everything fits in a place, minimizing part count by integrating functions and systems together in a way that makes the most sense, etc. CAD isn't useful for determining how a foam basketball behaves when flung by a spinning wheel, for example, so physical prototyping is very useful there. Once the effectiveness of an idea is demonstrated, though, it is turned over to me to iron out all of its implementation details. An important part of that process is being able to identify which characteristics of the prototype are important to emulate and which can be changed to accommodate other features and needs. Actually -- in reality, I am often designing a more complete version of whatever prototype my intuition tells me will be most successful concurrently to the physical prototyping. When I get it right, we save a lot of time; when I don't, I just start over. No big deal.