[Jon Stratis]

It really is too early to start "planning" on where the battery will go. There has been some great advice on here, but keep in mind that every game is different! For example, if you were climbing the tower this past year, depending on design you might not have wanted your CG to be in the middle of the robot... battery placement for many teams might have been a key component of getting the robot to hang correctly!

As others have alluded to, there could also be obstacles on the field or other rules that affect how you build your robot. For example, in BreakAway bumpers had to be fairly high, and pretty much every team used a riser kit to elevate the frame off the floor. This potentially gave you significant space underneath your main frame to put stuff!

As for location of your main mechanism, We've had ours all over the place! Our rookie year, we had mechanisms on the front and back of the robot. Over the years, we've built two "fork-lift" style elevators, where one was on the front and one was on the back. In BreakAway, we even had a mechanism that was primarily on the side of the robot!

When designing a robot, you really need to look at the entire thing. You can't design part here, part there, and mash it together and get something good. There's a lot of give and take as you build it up, a lot of planning that goes into making sure you have room for everything where you need it. If you want to practice for the next few weeks before kickoff, take last year's game/rules, and design a robot for that!