The First Seven Days of the Season

[Abhishek R]

We start prototyping the day after kickoff. We try to come up with as many initial concepts for mechanisms on kickoff itself.

Once the prototypes near completion and we test their efficiency out, we settle on a design and start putting bit by bit a wooden mockup of the robot. We have to run a pretty tight schedule since we build two (as close to as possible without CAD) identical robots, but we don't build them simultaneously. We begin with the practice robot and aim to finish that by week 4, then build the competition robot in the remaining weeks (it goes by faster once we've built the first one).

Something I've noticed we do differently, for better or for worse, is we don't dedicate an entire week or even a day to strategic planning or an attempt to model the game beyond kickoff. This is probably something we may want to think about a bit more as the games get more complex (in most years, it's basically been score max autonomous points, score a lot of teleop points, then accomplish the endgame as fast as possible). This may have led us to rethink the importance of being able to pick up the ball quickly for assists.