[Mike Harrison]

Definitely have your strategy laid out first, we normally have a brainstorming session where we talk strategy only... no details at all... then after we decide, "we want to do this, this and this", we have our design team come up with the best ways to do this, while other members prototype these designs using scrap parts and last years robot. Although i must say we got very sentimental with Gloria since she was a World Champ and didn't use her for prototyping until a lot later than most robots get scrapped. Very sad but I'm sure she would have agreed to it if the mentors would ever let us install that artificial intelligence and speech chip. We use SolidWorks for our design because we do all our designing at FANUC and thats what they have (I'm sure Paul has some arguments for it other than that).