The build schedule: how do you guys do it?

[F22Rapture]

This year ours was a nightmare. We met at most every other day for 3 hours (longer on weekends), with our sole programmer being grounded for a week, spent 3.5 weeks in the design phase, etc. With that in mind, I'm planning a timeline for next year with a few goals and checkpoints.


Phase 1: Abstract design - 1 week

• What will it do, how will it do it
• Which drivetrain
• How will it perform game tasks

Phase 2: Narrow design - 2 weeks

• Design specific subsystems
• CAD everything
• Kinematic analysis and revision
• Decide what parts are needed, and order them
• Export for CNC machining
• Begin programming

Phase 3: Build - 2 weeks

• Build as able, cut and assemble whatever is at hand
• Test, fix, iterate
• Have drivable before end of week 4

Phase 4: Train - 1 week

• Driver training
• Control system experimentation
• Finish programming
• Hone any algorithms

Goals:

• Meet no less than every other day in some capacity, even if it's just a few people
• Parallelism. While the design team is designing, the set build team and pit design team can still operate. Have scouts dedicated to browsing for information from previous similar games to see what worked and what didn't.
• Redundancy. Have at least two people capable of each task.
• Decide on a design and run with it. Do not spend 3.5 weeks on abstracts. Get things into CAD and onto paper as quickly as possible, to avoid finding major issues late into design.

Are there any improvements I can make to this timeline? I'm a Junior in HS and this is my first year, on a 2nd year team, so I'm not well versed on how long it takes to CAD and test things, or what is practical.

I also have a few questions:

• How many people do you have on your teams?
• What is your subteam breakdown like? How many programmers, how many designers.
• When do you start building in some capacity? When do you have something drivable?
• How many people participate in the nitty-gritty of turning concepts into blueprints?
• How much time do you spend training?
• At what point in the 6 weeks is your robot "complete?" (in the context of fully-functional)

Thank you from Team 3737 "Rotoraptors"