Your Design Process?

[vivek16]

Wait a day, brainstorm as a team, go over game strategy, pick out the most promising designs, prototype, design, build, break, redesign, rebuild, re break, redesign, lock engineer in crate to rebuild (Just kidding, everyone knows over caffeinated freshmen are more efficient and fit better).

-Vivek

[HokieTutorunie]

Thanks to all for the responces! We will tweak our process this year, using many of your procedures. We have gone to the shop too quickly in the past with a "git er done" done philosophy.

Please continue to post your ideas!

Steve

[AndyB]

We are doing something different this year. Because of how our team is organized (mentors = almost completely college students, no engineers) we set up the build season with build days on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Wednesday is a regrouping day for the mentors and a "family day" for the high school students. This also works out nice for those students who participate in Wednesday night religious activities.

On Wednesdays, we (mentors) will be meeting to discuss where we are at with everything, what needs to be done, what we have done, and how we can help certain high schoolers get more active in participation. We have never tried this, but on paper, I'm very excited. It looks like a great way to make sure things are getting done on time, that we aren't forgetting to do things, and most importantly, that we aren't letting students sit in the corner for six weeks.

[mbeardsworth]

We meet after we get back into town after the kickoff, and hopefully come out with a functional plan for the season.

First we discuss possible scoring strategies without worrying much about practical execution. We get some silly ones, but in general we have good ideas. We write a brief description of each strategy on a big whiteboard. After we have a few strategies, we evaluate the practicality.

We have to make lots of assumptions about how well a robot can do things, but we try to estimate how many points we can make per match with each strategy. We talk about the practicality of these ideas, and usually rule out the top-scoring one.

Finally we pick a design that won't be terribly difficult to execute, but will hopefully score well. We draw it up all pretty, and then we build the thing.

[akeisic]

At Beach Cities Robotics, we've developed and tested our systems engineering process over 2 years of FTC, FRC, VRC, and summer competitions. It's the key to our recent success. I posted the presentation and QFD matrix we use as the following white paper...

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2180?