December Design Competition 2014: Tubular Touchdown

SECOND Robotics is back! Kickoff is just around the corner, and before you get busy and stressed with robotics, take some time to get busy and stressed a whole month earlier! That's right, the December Design Competition is back for its second installment with a brand new game!

For those of you unfamiliar with the design competition, the basic idea is a group of friends and I have created our own FRC game in order to provide a challenge to the FIRST community to better prepare people for the strategic design and game analysis required at the beginning of the FRC season in hopes that participants will utilize what they have learned from the competition to make their 2015 FRC team perform at a higher level of play. Individuals (or groups of people) design their own complete robot to participate in this year's game, Tubular Touchdown.

The manual for Tubular Touchdown may be found here, and the game documents and CAD models may be found here.

Each team of contestants must turn in a CAD design for their robot as well as written documentation detailing their robot, their strategies for the game, their strategic design and thought process. Basically anything in the normal season that cannot be portrayed simply via the CAD model would be helpful having in writing. It will help your score to have more documentation about your processes.

This is a relaxed competition. We know this is a busy time of year for many people, so when it comes to CAD models, thorough completeness will not be a factor judged upon. This doesn't mean you can leave out entire subsystems, but if you don't have nuts/bolts or shafts, it won't hurt you. As long as your general design gets across and you can explain it in words, you will be able to be less attentive to minor details on design. That being said it's always cool to look at well designed and detailed robots, so if you have the time, we'd love to see what you come up with in full detail.

The competition begins today and ends at noon Pacific time on January 1st, and our goal is to have a winner chosen before kickoff. Last year the winner wished to stay anonymous, and while we will fulfill those wishes if our winners prefer, we would like to say that many people were interested in knowing which robot won last year and were disappointed that they missed out on viewing what was truly a beautiful design.

For submission, if you use Solidworks, Pack and Go your assembly and put the zipped folder in a folder with your documentation. Otherwise simply send a STEP file along with your documentation. Submissions should be sent to alawre1@gmail.com.

Myself, wasayanwer97, Jay O'Donnell, and mahnyi worked on this project over our Thanksgiving breaks, and we hope you all enjoy it. If you have any questions feel free to post them in this thread and we will get back to you asap (like hella quickly).

Good luck everyone, and happy holidays!