Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitchhiker 42
A lot of teams do a second practice robot. Our team hasn't done one yet, but we want to this year. Is there any advice you'd give to a lower-budget team on doing this?
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Here's how we do it now:
Build proof of concept drive train. The programmers get this for testing and driving around and for sensor integration. This was very useful this year as we found out we needed to redesign for the moat. Eventually this gets reworked into the practice robot. Quality is usually less than we'd like but we learn how to build the robot. Once that's largely settled, the competition robot is built. The competition robot gets more care and is generally higher quality as we've learned how to do it from the practice robot. Programming may only get a few days on the competition robot but it's largely finding the small differences between the two at this point and taking that into account in code.
The key thing is getting to the point you can build both during build season. If you can't, build the competition robot first and then work on reducing your time over the years to get the 2nd robot up and running. Also, you need to try to build them as identical as possible. If the competition robot has a mistake in it, you might need that mistake on the practice robot so include it.