Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?

[FRC4ME]

Perfectly fine but I would like to share a bit of adbice:

1. Don't starve yourselves of resources to get the second bot done. Make sure you can build one good bot first.

2. The practice bot is for practice. After the main bot ships, you must keep the practice bot as close to the real one as possible, because that's what you'll have to work with at the competition.

I've witnessed what happens when you try to use a "practice bot" along with the withholding allowance to make the six week build season a nine week build season. It doesn't work at all.

[techedguy]

We've been using an older control system on the kitbot for programming practice, sensors, ect. We are working on making the control system swappable between chassis and using the KOP chassis for practice and a "real" chassis for competition. Of course once the 'bot ships we'll have the KOP chassis to practice with. (which just thinking it through means I need to order more sensors...)

[Cheerleader1073]

Just an input, we've done this for the last two years and it's 1.) AWESOME if you have a big team do keep them busy, 2.) great practice, 3.) perfectly legal, but 4.) takes time... as in finish the real robot first, then build this one along the way or even after if you can! We've made the mistake on working on both simultaneously and not focusing on the real one as much as we could have!

Good luck!

[huberda]

We've been building a practice robot for at least 3 years (including this one). We should be almost (if not completely finished) with our practice robot by the end of this week to the beginning of next week.

It shows off any flaws that may come out in a design before the competition, so you have time to improve it. Additionally, your drivers will thank you for it.

It is definitely something to seriously consider.

[Tuba4]

A practice bot is always a good idea, if time and resources allow. This year we set up an old chassis with a 6 wheel drive like we plan on using. We are using an old VEX robot controller and RC 2 joystick controller to complete the mix. Granted we won't have all the functionality of our comp bot, but for driver practice it will work well.

[artdutra04]

This year we're actually working on three robots: a prototype robot, a practice robot, and the competition robot.

The prototype robot was assembled, wired, and programmed entirely on our first meeting out of Kitbot parts and serves two purposes: give the programming team time to figure out sensors, drive code, autonomous, etc on a real robot, and provide a modular base chassis for us to prototype mechanism ideas on. Prototypes mounted on it have been built out of Kitbot parts, 80/20 parts, Vex parts, and whatever else we have lying around.

After all of the subsystems have been proven using prototypes on the prototype robot, we then move onto designing the entire final robot in SolidWorks. Once the design is done, we split up all the parts to a variety of different sources, including sponsors and our team machine shop, so we can have parts back faster. We also do this to incorporate a number of different fabrication techniques, to show our students different ways ideas can become reality.

Once the parts have been made, we assemble the functionally identical practice and competition robots almost concurrently, although the competition robot usually lags behind the practice robot by a few days due to powder-coating lead times.

[MaxMax161]

Our team builds two robots every year. First we build a prototype bot, this is usually finished by week 3, 3 and a half. After we build this bot we use what we learned from building it to build a "flight bot" that we send to the competition. This flight bot is much easier to build because we know exactly what to do. After ship date we use the prototype bot for driver practice. Having a practice bot (and extra driver practice) before regionals is absolutely game changing. I strongly recommend you build one if possible.