[Gui Cavalcanti]

Ken, thanks for the huge, detailed thread. Your steps are very rational and helpful, but I don't agree with your timeline.

My main problem with the schedule is that our team maxes out at around 10 people, and we're working in a room with a drill press, hack saw, and jigsaw. We can get machined parts, but we either have to send part drawings out and get them back when machinists have the time to do them, or drive to a shop 40 minutes away and do them ourselves. We were still assembling the robot halfway into week 5 last year because we didn't get the parts in time. Therefore, we have to have a much shorter design cycle in order to get anything moving at all, given the amount of time machining takes.

When you say that you break down into subsystem "How", and things like that, could you go into a little more detail? The reason I ask is this: we break down into teams, say Drive Train, Chassis, and Subsystem, but the problem is they frequently come up with three separate entities that are expected to click together like Legos. I was thinking of maybe combining all three groups initially, but designing by large committee is never a good idea in my book. Is there an easy way teams have found to do this?