When does your team start actually designing a robot?

[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.