Hi guys. I’ve realized that our team seem to struggle with fast assembly turnaround. While it takes some other teams less than half a week to assemble their robot, its been one and a half week and we’re still not quite there yet. I’m curious if there is a set of workflow that other teams use or ways of preventing oversights such as misaligned holes, incorrect tolerance, or part lost after fabrication… Assembly has historically been a struggle for us and it would be great if we can speed up the assembly process. Any tips? Thanks!
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There’s thousands of teams, and a couple hundred have posted complete robots. Don’t sweat it. In 2022 our robot’s first successful powerup was on load in before our comp. It’s fine if you don’t have a robot until the day of the comp, it’s fine if you finish it at the comp.
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This is a challenge for our team too. The biggest things are designing simple and designing well.
Something we have found works well for us is making drawings for the parts that we want made in house. This gives tolerances, materials, hole size, etc…. We have also found that there are many times where one can get away with a 3D print (something that takes significantly less human time to set up).
As for design, design with a bunch of techniques. For us, we have a few different machines in our shop, plus a machine shop sponsor. We try and spread our workload across that as much as possible. This means that we can have 2 sets of students on many machines working at the same time. This helps get our pieces through faster.
As for alignment, CAD everything, and I mean everything. The entire robot. And if you machine correctly, you should have holes that align. Part of that is correct machining practice, which is a training thing, and if you give people drawings, and they are required to check pieces then they should go through well.
Overall, our team is not perfect, in fact we have failed many times because of our inability to manufacture on time, so you should take everything with a grain of salt. However these are the lessons we have learned through our our seasons, and id like to think their worth some thinking.
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Keep in mind that every team is different, and if something worked for them, it won’t necessarily work for you. In my opinion, the best way to check what is the best way for your team is by doing an off-season project, not in the middle of the build season.
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Is your issue with manufacturing parts or assembling them once they’re made?
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As others have said, don’t beat yourself up over a slower build. With that said, its good to always be working to improve so here are some strategies, some that have helped my team be less slow and others that I have heard work well for other teams:
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Design review signoff before manufacturing: basically a rule that you need X people to sign off on a part before it can be made. The idea is to check that the design both works and is the best way to implement the idea. There are much better resources than me about design reviews tho
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If the holes and tolerance you mentioned were from manufacturing, you may want to try using drawings for hand machining as well as part inspections before assembly to check dimensions and tolerances
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Subsystem boxes/shelves: you mentioned losing parts, one thing that can help with that is assigning a location for each subsystem and putting all associated parts there as soon as they are made or arrive and only take them out when you are ready to assemble them. 971 does this and has some good docs on their system (somewhere, maybe a spartan series vid?)
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BOM/robot tracker: my team is having some success with what we call a “robot tracker”. It is basically a BOM (bill of materials) mixed with a to-do list and a barebones inventory. It has (almost) every part on our robot, broken down by subsystem, with a bunch of info about it. this helps to highlight next steps or areas that are running behind as well as keep everyone on the same page. It can also be referenced for ordering or machining. here are some screenshots:
There is a LOT that I cant even begin to cover, but 971 has a good overview here and there is lots of advice for project management and fabrication in other CD threads.
I hope this helped; see you at SVR!
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If you’re talking specifically about assembly workflows, our team makes an assembly workflow for each subsystem on our robot. They’re made by the designer (CAD) working with an assembly member. Then, the assembly people can build the subsystem without the designer present. We do our best to be as specific as possible, referencing exact part numbers and annotated screenshots of the CAD.
Here’s an example:
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Thank you! This is a great idea. We’ve had issues with assembly when the main designer for the subsystem was out, and this will help a lot!
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Assembling them once they’re made. The main issue though is we take a long time to assemble after the parts have been finished. We’re a school team, so we’re limited in the time we can come in and use the shop. We haven’t had too much issues with fabrication tolerances, and we can usually fabricate parts for a subsystem within half a week.
This is an interesting issue! Our team is the same as yours: something always goes awry during assembly. Thanks for bringing this up!
That link is to a Titans of CNC video…
ooops… ig thats why you dont write CD posts at 1 am lol. should be fixed now.
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