-Meet with other teams
We always meet with another team after kick-off to get out-of-the box ideas. It helps to bring in totally new people and concepts into the discussion.
-Pick a way to score.
In my opinion the best and safest way to design a robot is to pick one strategy and stick too it. Although there are plenty of teams that "Do Everything" there are far more teams that fail to "Do Everything." Decide what you think will be the best way to score and design your robot to do it.
-Prototype... A lot...
Professional engineers have a great deal of experience and often don't need to do a lot of physical testing. They can see problems on-paper before they get built.
Most students lack this experience... On team 100 we brainstorm what we feel will be the five best designs and try them out. Doing this takes a lot of time, but it guarantees that the final design will work. Our prototyping is very in-depth, we built an entire fully functioning prototype of the Tube-a-saurus before it got built.
Prototype is on the left
-Perfect the design in CAD
Take what you learned from the prototype and put it into the CAD. We went through several CAD revisions before we perfected our design.
After you have done all of this, you will feel very confident in where you are going. It will just be a matter of building.