When and how do you create a whole-robot design?

[ohrly?]

Originally Posted by iyermihir

Do you CAD your robot before you build it? This can really help you with robot design. If you provide more information on your design process, we may be able to give your better suggestions.

Yes, we CAD our robot, but we only realize the problems in week 5 when we get our parts back.

Originally Posted by Siri

Systems integration--putting the mechanisms together into a robot--is also something much easier/better done before and with mechanism development rather than after. When we nail down out strategy, we also roughly allocate things like space, weight and motors. As mechanism designs (both CAD and prototyping in our case) mature, the system integration matures with it. This is not an easy task, but it's worth it to have a better robot at the end. We're usually done the major integration decisions by week 4, though the chassis and drivetrain construction at least starts before then. It continues to change a bit until...well, this past Saturday. Actually, the Saturday of IRI.

Thanks for the advice. I'm definitely going to show that video to my team! How do you go about allocating space, weight and motors before you have developed your mechanisms?

Originally Posted by Thunder910

The moral here is that it is difficult to integrate systems that aren't meant to go together. Some teams can integrate differing systems extremely well- Code Orange's bot is basically what we wanted to do, just couldn't pull it off.

I think this is our problem. We definitely develop our mechanisms independently, and they are meant to work well, not to work with the other mechanisms. Which is why they don't work well when we finally put them together on a robot. Thanks for your help!