How long does your team plan?

[Dan Petrovic]

We are going through some drastic changes between this year and previous years for our build schedule. 2005 we were working at BAE systems, but the entire first week was held in a classroom at the high school brainstorming. The final design wasn't even created then.

This past year, we brainstormed for the shooter and tried to agree on which design to use. Both of these design phases have been done with a committee involving the entire team.

However, this upcoming year, we are going to have a smaller design group with 8-10 students and maybe 3-4 mentors. They will be making all the decisions as far as the robot design goes. Anyone can give input, but the final design will be created by this crew. We plan to start on Monday and end on Friday, then present the final design to the entire team. I have a feeling the manipulator will be designed earlier on so prototyping can begin for those who are not on the design team.

So basically. Saturday of Kickoff and Sunday is spent with the team learning the rules and simulating the game so we can agree on VERY general functions of the robot. Using 2006 as an example, the team would decide that the robot picks up from the floor and shoots in the high goal.
Then Monday - Friday is design/field element construction/prototyping
Saturday week 2 onwards for maybe a week - Protyping and build
Week 3,4 and most likely 5 - build
maybe 5 and 6 - practice and software integration.
Our schedule says that we should have a completely and fully funtional robot by 2/7. That's a reasonable goal, right? It gives us a good, challenging goal, and some fudge time incase things don't go exactly our way, which seems to be the case every year.

I hope that answered your question.