Duke,
Be sure to be at the meetings this Wednesday and Thursday, they will both be dedicated to design process training by myself and
nitbaj. We'll be doing a dry-run breakdown of a more-than-four-year-old game using 461's design philosophies up to the point at which the concepts would be handed off to the tech team for further development. We do it pretty much like most teams in FIRST, including the JVN methods mentioned earlier.
Basically we:
- Breakdown the elements of the game and identify keys to the game.
- List all possible basic robot tasks and determine their priority.
- Convert the game keys to performance specifications.
- Evaluate the robot tasks as compared to the specifications using a decision matrix.
- Brainstorm ways to complete the chosen tasks.
At this point, the mechanism concepts are evaluated using a variety of metrics, including feasibility given the team resources (personnel, available fabrication) and the kit (motor usage, pneumatic go/no go). At this point the team design process is complete and the viable concepts are handed off to the tech subteams for technical development.
Of course, none of this works unless you can be creative, open-mined, impartial and cooperative. You and the 461 kids are all of those things, therefore, Rowdy12 will be awesome.
I hope everyone else's robots are awesome too! I love seeing great robots at competition, the more the better.