Who started building before Kickoff?

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

Every off-season, our club builds two or three bases with different drive systems so that even newer students to the club have a background in building them and so that we keep our skills with different drive trains strong.

Then, as a part of our design process, we choose a drive train from those we know how to build. (No experiments with drive trains during build season! We want to maximize the time we have to spend on the manipulators.)

We're moving that way, along a different path. While we recycle most of our manipulator pieces between years (we did keep our Frisbee shooter, it's great for demos), we've begun keeping the drive chassis from each year. At the start of next build season, we expect to have a 6-wheel skid steer, an H-drive, and a mecanum ready to go to support manipulator prototyping. We usually decide on the drive train rather quickly, so the competition drive train should be (nearly) ready when we to build the competition manipulators.