When does your team start actually designing a robot?

[electronicsdude]

-We went through the points system and rules the figured out the maximum points available.
-Brainstormed strategy.
-Made some preliminary designs yesterday.
-We have today "off" but were reading the rules multiple more times and coming up with more designs.
-Monday we plan to finish planing and starting to CAD our design.
-Then from there on prototyping, building, and changing.

[Bluejackets]

we are already in the prosses of prototyping out robot and we have our strategy down and we are about half way done with the practice field we have a team of 25 people

[tindleroot]

Originally Posted by electronicsdude

we plan to finish planing

Really planning ahead aren't you?

[Amy33Amy33]

Yesterday we read the rules as a team, decided strategy, and then started with robot concepts. Today we decided our drive train, and CAD will start with it tonight. Tomorrow we will probably finish design, and CAD will probably have drawings by Wednesday.

[alopex_rex]

Yesterday we started by talking about rules and ways to score, and then once we had a good grasp of the game we moved on to strategy. We try to have a consensus big-picture strategy by the end of kick-off day. This year we came to a consensus more quickly than usual, so we dipped a bit into design, and ended up agreeing on a basic vision of what our robot would do.

Today we went right into discussing design decisions: kind of drive train, orientation of robot, etc. By the end of the meeting CAD was already hard at work mocking up possible mechanisms, and mechanical was beginning to build prototypes. I think we want to have our design basically done by the end of our next Sunday (long) meeting.

We've been going faster this year than in the past, intentionally, as we want to get our robot mechanically done earlier so we have time for fine-tuning the programming and driver practice. I guess we'll see how it goes.