Quote:
Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0
That seems a little low. How are you estimating that? Are you just counting teams that you know did a complete robot in CAD?
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Can't speak for the person you're asking, but I remember being stunned at the number of teams at Championships who didn't use CAD or only used extremely limited amounts of CAD at the 2013 Championship. You can build some fantastic robots without even a little bit of it.
In Minnesota, significant use of CAD is extremely rare. Only a few teams I talked to have a reasonably complete model of their robot, and the vast majority used it to model maybe a couple of parts.
Personally, while I personally love CAD, and would never design a robot without it, I don't push it. CAD is something you can only really do effectively if you have students/mentors/et cetera who
want to do CAD. It takes a significant time investment to become competent, so the best way I've found to get people/teams interested in CAD is to get them excited about performing well and doing well at competition. A little bit of competitive spirit goes a long way.
Edit, to answer the OP:
I'll speak for the teams I have first-hand knowledge of:
2220, while I was on it (11-14), was pretty solid on getting a reasonably complete CAD model when I was on the team. Of course, most of that work ended up being me, but I believe the last couple years they've had a reasonably complete model. When I was on the team it was Creo or Pro/E, with a little bit of Solidworks, Inventor, or AutoCAD for students or mentors who preferred that. Now I believe they're almost entirely Solidworks, but you'd have to ask someone who is currently on the team about that.
2667 had no students doing CAD any of the years I worked with them. I maintained a personal model to check dimensions and explain concepts, but none of the students contributed to that model. This was due to a variety of reasons, but ultimately it worked out decently and now there are some students who are really pushing CAD for next year. I used Creo, they'll probably use Inventor.
9205 (FTC) does a CAD model of everything other than physically correct chain. I've worked with a couple of the students over the past two years to build up enough knowledge that they could probably design a reasonably complete robot in Creo without much or any input from me. This means I get to help with different things
Finally, 'Snow Problem (Ri3D) keeps a reasonably complete mechanical CAD model throughout the three days. It's almost all me on that, with a bit of Evan and Ryan contributing, particularly with 3D printing stuff. That's almost all Creo, with a bit of Solidworks for Evan.
I'm pretty sure the heavy CAD use on 3/4 of my teams is the exception, not the norm.