CAD team

[ecchorobotics]

On Team 75 we organize the Design group members into different areas that work towards creating the design. We usually have about 10-12 members on the design team, so we split it up into roles:

>Inventor Parts: Everyone. Each person can create an individual part after we've discussed it on the whiteboard to give to the 'assemblers'.
>Inventor Assemblies: 1 or 2 People. Assemblies are more complex, and everyone has their own ways and habits of doing it. 2 of the more experienced members work in separate subassemblies, and then they will merge them in the main assembly.
>Research: 2+ People. People who aren't doing parts are researching existing ideas to use and improve on. Why reinvent the wheel? In 2010, our team modeled our hanging mechanism off of the concept of a firefighter's ladder- it was telescopic and emulated a ladder's stages during extend and retract.
>Documentation: 3+ People. Each year we document our process as thoroughly as we can by taking pictures, maintaining detailed parts/ assembly lists, and by creating presentation drawings and instructions. We also do Inventor Simulations and save the results in case of failures in the future.
>DWG's: Everyone. Drawings are required to get our parts programmed into CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) to be CNC'd. All of our DWG's are dimensioned for reference and for machining information.
>Mechanical Group Liaison: 2 People. When the mechanical members have questions about assembly, parts, or in case a part is incorrect, the design team must know so it can be corrected in the Inventor model and have the DWG's updated for machining the correct part. If it is simply a general assembly question, these 2 people are responsible for aiding in the assembly of any complex parts that may be confusing on paper.
>Autodesk Design Award Submission: Everyone (on the entire team). The design team is heavily influenced by the strategy team. At the same time, design heavily influences many other parts of the team. As a result, we compile the data, documents, photos, videos, animations, lists, drawings, models, and any other content that has affected the robot. Everyone is responsible for contributing their work to the submission. In the end, we compile, clean up, and organize all of the work into one chronological document showcasing how we got to the final design. This document is not just for the Award Submission, but also for our records and archives of the year's successes and shortcomings.

All in all, for each subassembly (drive train, arm, end effector, etc.), we have several general meetings with everyone on a regular basis to ensure we are all moving in the same direction, and design members break off into pairs to work on a design. In a few days, after some collaboration and problem solving, we take everyone's rough designs and mold them all into one main design. Then we edit each design slightly to work together coherently, and then we further develop each part of the robot until we are satisfied with the results.

We used a numbering system to organize our parts. It was a three part file name that worked like this:

[YEAR]-[ASSEMBLY NUMBER + PART NUMBER]-[PART DESCRIPTION]

So an example would be:

2011-0208-Gearbox Side Plate

The year is always constant, but the assembly/part number works like this: each subassembly gets a number in the one-hundreds: 0100 is Main Assembly, 0200 is Gearbox Assembly, 0300 is Arm Assembly, etc.
Each part in that assembly gets a single digit increase. So the third part in the Gearbox Assembly would be numbered: 2011-0203-BlahBlahPart.ipt
The 17th part in the Arm Assembly would be 2011-0317-AnotherPart.ipt

Pros of this naming system are that it is easy to organize files in the project, it's easier to make the BOM at the end, and it makes finding files a breeze. The cons are that it's easy to mess up the number and have to go back and re number each part manually. Then you have to go back and make sure Inventor knows you renamed them or else it will ask you to find all the parts for it when you open the assemblies ('resolve'). We use an Excel Workbook to organize the part numbers. In the spreadsheet, we can insert cost, weight, and block dimensions into cells that will come back red if we are overweight or over-budget, and tell us what part's we've done and what we still need to do. It also has dates and % completed of each assembly, so if a subassembly is not 100% by the date we specified in the schedule, we know that we need to pick up the pace in order to meet the deadline. Our schedule is tight in order for us finish the design within the first 3-4 weeks so that after assembly, wiring, and programming, we have enough time to practice and troubleshoot.

Also, we used dropbox to share files this year. But we are transitioning into a Vault server. Alternatively, you can use the free hosting from Autodesk called Autodesk Cloud (it's new this year!) to share parts and collaborate with others.

I hope this information helps. Best of luck.

-75