Designing the Robot Schedule

[Pault]

Generally my team likes to have a 1 week design phase. This phase looks something like this:

Saturday: After the game is released, we break up into groups and basically get out all of those ideas that are flying around in everybody's heads. Each group comes up with a robot design, and presents it. The only purpose of doing this is to get all of the excitement out. None of the designs are actually intended for use.

Sunday: Now we start the actual design phase from the beginning. Sunday is devoted to figuring out what we want to do. We break up into groups again, and sometimes use an informal, simplified form of the weighted objective table to rate every possible robot task that we can think of. By the end of the day, we should have a good idea of what we want our robot to do.

Monday-Friday: These days are reserved for prototyping. We come up with different things to prototype, and just do it. That's about it. Also, people start to think of actual designs for our robot.

Saturday: This is D5 (Drop Dead Design Decision Day). We go in, we have people present their ideas for robot designs, we discuss, and by the time we leave the school, we have decided what our robot is going to look like.