[Jash_J]

Saying CAD is essential in order to reach "the next level" is quite vague. There are many things that can be done in order to successfully have a 6 week build season but it starts from the ground up. Having the skills to CAD itself can help significantly, however it does not mean you will be successful. A good example of that is our team's robot in 2015. The entire robot was designed using CAD; however we failed to prototype effectively which ultimately lead us to believe that we could do more than we could.

If I could suggest one key aspect to build season that most teams should be capable of doing, it would be prototyping. Prototyping not only allows you to determine which mechanism would be best to solve that year’s game problem, but it also allows you to refine the idea until you have the best iteration of it. If then, you would like to CAD the prototypes and integrate them into one large robot that would be ideal, as you would find any integration problems before you reach your build phase. However, please realize that if you begin to CAD without any preliminary model to base your designs off of, it will be extremely tough to have a successful build season as there may be problems that occur once you have built the CAD model of your robot.