Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnFogarty
I've never been on a team that made a practice robot. Do I want to, yes. Competing in FTC taught me what being able to iterate, practice, and program over the season can do. Problems for my team in SC is that our season is super front loaded, Week 1- 2 usually.
I'd personally like to know what the logistics are in building 2+ robots. Do you build them side by side, is it one is the prototype bot from early in build then the other the competition bot, and how early do you have to build them to get them done fast enough to have one ready for bag...
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At 1648, we start building the practice robot first. However, as subsystems are "finalized", the competition pieces get built in the season. So for example, our drivetrain gets designed fairly early, so the competition version gets built at almost the same time as the practice version. We then continue to design from the chassis, getting to the frame and manipulators. The practice frame is built after the chassis, and there's usually a few modifications we make to the practice frame design before we fabricate it for the competition version.
The last items are the manipulators, since these go under constant iteration. For these mechanisms, we usually don't start fabricating the super structure or manipulator components until a week or 5 days before bag day, so that we can squeeze in as much iteration time as possible before we start fabricating competition pieces. The idea is to have continuous iteration while the competition robot gets built during the final week.