Is CAD essential to all teams?

[philso]

No. I have watched CAD use go from 0% to essentially 100% in the workplace over the last 30+ years.

Originally Posted by asid61

More important than CAD and design is good strategy.

The skills needed to design a superior mechanism or to develop a superior strategy are different from the skills needed to make CAD drawings. As Asid and others have said, having the ability to do CAD will enhance your teams ability to develop superior mechanisms and strategies. Being able to use CAD tools is like being able to use a piece of word processing software such as MS WORD. It does not mean that one has the writing skills of Shakespeare or Hemmingway.

Originally Posted by asid61

I do highly recommend learning CAD purely for figuring out linkages and geometry, however. That's something easier done on a computer than by hand. I would avoid paper simply because it's more hassle for students than CAD in my experience. 973's RAMP has some good videos on it.

An example of this would be to draw a simple profile of your robot and "drive" it under the Low Bar to make sure it really fits.

In addition to using tutorials on YouTube, it would be best to supplement that with some "CAD Mentors", even informal ones. I was asking one of my co-workers for tips on how to do specific things in SolidWorks. He would email me sequences of screen shots and I would pass them back to our CAD team. It saved them hours of time.