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

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by ohrly?

I'd love to know how your head mentor goes about coordinating CAD. None of our mentors are mechanical engineers (actually, none are engineers at all), so the students coordinate the CAD as a group of about 5. Does he set requirements/specifications before the CAD is started, or does he let them start and then facilitate discussion to avoid conflicts?

We quite simply didn't have enough people that are skilled enough at detailed CAD design + system integration that management at the "end" of the process is a problem. I think we just used a Google Drive this year between him and the 2 other people doing full subsystems in CAD.

We have a fair number of first and second year students who know enough Inventor to draw up prototypes and make part drawings for those prototypes, but they're a little ways off from being able to do full subsystem CAD. This year for manipulator, the CAD workflow went from student prototyper -> a mentor (me) to touch up the details and integrate lessons learned -> head mentor to integrate the subsystem with the whole robot. Students were around every step of the way.

Once we're fortunate enough to have a larger CAD team (should be this season, we have a lot of promising sophomores who made real contributions this year), we'll probably move on to some more sophisticated version control.