Designing to Improve

[LeelandS]

After coming home from St. Louis, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that it often helps a team's competitive edge is they continue to add and improve upon their robot as the season progresses. While we were a consistently strong team at Finger Lakes, not needing any fancy gizmos to win the event, setting wheel onto the Galileo field proved to be a significant challenge for us. We were a moderate cycler, making 3-4 trips with about 80%-85% accuracy, but we lacked a floor pick-up or powerful climb that would help us stand out.

I am hoping to find some input from teams who have made significant improvements (I'm not talking tweaking some software or a minor addition; I'm thinking of teams who have added whole new mechanisms or redesigns in the past) on the following subjects:

Were the things you added part of your original design? Did your initial robot concept begin with all the bells and whistles, and you built what you could in the initial 6-weeks and added what you needed to later? Or did you build a simple robot and then added what you wanted after that based on ideas you picked up later?

Do you intentionally leave spaces on your robots where improvements could be added, or do you find space when you need it? If you don't specifically have improvements in mind for the originally shipped robot, do you try and keep the weight/cost as low as possible to prepare for future changes?

Do you have a full or partial practice robot to test your changes? Do you have a practice robot at all?

After adding a mechanism, how have your results varied? Did they often come out working as you had intended, or do they require further tweaking before you begin using them consistently?

What other practices do you keep in mind to help with the addition of new mechanisms? Do you try to keep the entire design modular so subsystems can just "snap" on and off? Anything else?

I appreciate any and all's inputs on any and all of these subjects.

-Leeland