The First Seven Days of the Season

[Oblarg]

Here's roughly what both 449 and 4464 do:

Day 1: Pure strategy discussion. No mention of robot design except to rule out strategies that we're sure we can't build. No design details. The deliverable from this day are the design constraints: What does the robot need to do? How well does it need to be able to do it? How can we evaluate how well a design executes a given strategy? Everyone must know the rules by the end of this day.

Day 2: Rough design outline. Generate coherent robot designs from design constraints determined in day 1. Heavy use of design matrices and similar tools to inform discussion. Decision made on which design(s) to proceed into prototyping with.

Days 3-7: The structure gets looser here; there's generally a mix of prototyping and design reviews to figure out what's feasible and what's not. Eventually we downselect to a single robot concept and set of mechanisms; for mechanisms with identical functionality, we might decide to run with two designs in parallel with the intent of choosing later on once it becomes clear which is superior.