[tickspe15]

Our schedule has been evolving over the years but last year we found/stumbled into a sweet spot for our team. During week one we work on rule comprehension, game point analysis, and basic prototypes to determine difficulty of tasks, we also finalize our drive train and order the cots parts necessary During week two we work hard to prototype all the subsystems and determine one or two designs to peruse for each. Then during week three we finish prototyping and create a semi final cad model, we meet less this week due to finals. During weeks 4 and 5 we kick into high gear and finish our practice Bot and weld it in house to improve the turnaround time, then once we know the design meets our standards we make any necessary changes and then send it out to be welded by our sponsor (much prettier). We then have week six to work on programming and driver practice.

the reason we are able to have a seemingly fast build for the final robots is because we use cots products wherever possible. For example we use the kop drive unless we have a very good reason to do otherwise, we have done swerve drives, mechanum, and custom tank drives in the past but have noticed that our robots over the past 10years have been more successful when using a kop or similar drive.