Do you think a practice robot is needed to compete?

[TedG]

Originally Posted by DaveL

We have never built a practice bot.
I like the idea of having separate hardware for the programmers to work on.
What kind of schedule do you follow?

Is the competitive bot finished before the practice bot is started or
do you build a practice bot first to try out the base and some critical design elements and then build the competition bot?

Dave

I can't speak for other teams, and our team is still new at this.
But for us, we start building a prototype "base" as soon as we know what type of drive train and base configuration it will be. This is basically for driving around and putting mock items on to check if things are going to fit or work. And for programming.

And then once we know what we're building for real, we start to build the real one.

For us this year, I suspect we will take the prototype further so there will be (2) robots that function the same way with all stuff on it, one for practice, one for competition.

That's my gut feeling anyway, I'm not 100% involved in those decisions.