Over PHRED's eight years our team has developed a process for deciding on what robot we are going to build. We go through this process over the first three days of build season. After we go though it we know what our robot is going to do and how the robot is going to do what it does.
Four steps to choosing a FRC robot:- Why
As a whole team we go through the game's rules to understand game and scoring rules. Then we brainstorm ideas for different strategies.
- Who
This step is slightly dependent on the game, but in the past years teams have played in alliances of three robots. In this step we break up into small groups of 4 to 5 students and each group comes up with an alliance of single function robots robots that would play the game best. Then we get back together as a full team again and choose one of those robots to build.
The important thing in this step is that each robot can only have one main function. This comes from us in the past trying to build a robot that can do everything and in the end we find that the robot can barely do any of them. After that year we came up with the motto: Build a robot that can do one thing repeatably and reliably.
- What
During this step we decide exactly what the functions of the robot are going to be. Not necessarily how it is going to do them (that is the next step) but what they are, and how the robot is going to play the game.
- wHow
In the last step we decide on the specific design of the robot, how exactly it is going to do what we need it to do.