Practice Robot?

[ns3517]

I apologize for the title being named "practice" I forgot to put the word "bot" after and don't know if or how you can edit it

[pilleya]

I fixed the title

[nickbrickmaster]

Last year was our first year building a replica practice bot, and we plan to again this year. Our team is no more than 10 students right now (don't recall exactly) and about the same last year.

How we did it: Many days, long hours, and Mountain Dew. We kept meeting 4 days a week (M/T/Th/Sa) throughout competition season (dropping Sunday from our week.) On stop build night, we worked until about 10, and while some were tweaking the comp bot, others cut most of the parts for the practice bot (It helped to use the kit chassis.) IIRC the practice bot was finished no later than the end of Week One.

The ideal is to build two of every part, but that's time-prohibitive and things could change. Because we planned the practice bot from the start, we made sure to buy double everything we needed and restock on things we didn't have enough of.

[GeeTwo]

We are at about 20 members this year, and are planning to continue doing a practice robot. Even at 10-15, we would continue doing a practice robot (at least partially) assuming we have the budget.

OK, how do you do a practice robot?

Have the same crew (or at least a common set of core members) build the practice robot as the competition robot. This is to ensure that they are as alike as possible.

One of the things which has helped us greatly is using a (modified) kit chassis. If you can build two essentially identical chassis and control systems, and can keep your manipulators down to the withholding allowance weight, you can achieve 80-90% of the benefit of two full robots. Edit: versaframe, or WCP chassis can likely be just as successful, but we've had good results with the AM14U series kits. The key is to be able to build two identical chassis that meet your needs fairly quickly.

When we had many more members, we would switch back and forth between our two robots during the end of build season, and not decide which to bag until very near the end. (In 2015, we switched around noon on bag day!). With fewer members, our top priority for "seconds" is on a drive chassis and control system; we'll be ready to only do a single version of the manipulators. Then, at bag, we can pull the manipulators, put them on the practice chassis, and continue drive practice and development until competition.

[Chief Hedgehog]

A team of 10-12 students is fine. However, how many dedicated mentors do you have? And how many hours per week are you meeting?

In terms of mentors, you need either need a handful of dedicated mentors, or 1-2 very regimented mentors on board with this endeavor from the get-go. If you only have 1-2 mentors, you will need a very strict build schedule with objectives clearly laid out ahead of time.

Does your team use a gantt chart? If not, this is something to look into working with this season (it will pay HUGE dividends in coming seasons).

What do you plan to use for a drive train? As you are probably aware, the drivetrain is the most time-consuming part of a robot build if you have not previously developed one. If you do not already have one mocked up I am assuming you will use the AM14U3 (great drive train, but you need 2).

Weekly Schedule - it is not that the second robot will double your build time, just the workload. If you plan accordingly, many components (if you CAD correctly) can be fabricated quickly. If your team does not have a robust CAD team, then you are going to struggle big time.

If you can head into Westtown with a team that knows your robots' limitations as well as it's advantages, you are a long way ahead of many other teams. What we have learned on 4607 is that this knowledge of what will work and what won't (and the circumstances you will face) is very valuable. As other teams are trying to figure out how their robot is failing, you are already beyond this and are working to improve through this obstacles.

Good luck this season!