I would love to be able to draft out our entire robot in detail. The only problem is that I am the sole person using Inventor on my team. I have used it so far to test all of our individual ideas before starting on it. My question is how many of you use inventor to design rather then just drafting the results after the design is already made? I ask this with utmost respect for those teams that are able to do what I am not.
I don’t use Inventor (I use Pro/E, since that’s what USC uses), but I did use it to design 1618’s drive system this year. I took a few liberties (using an IFI 24T sprocket when I was using the kit one, “bolts” were a couple of extruded cylinders, I left out wheel spacers and chains, etc.). Truthfully, some things that I left off were more necessary than I thought…but it was a nice way to make sure what you think will work will work. Just keep in mind that at some point, you’ll have to hit the export to reality button.
Students on The ThunderChickens (Team 217) have Solidworks training every fall (Solidworks is almost identical to Inventor). About a dozen students learn how to design with it, and once the season starts, almost the entire robot is designed in Solidworks by students, not engineers. The engineers brush the drawings up with some lightening holes and mechanical feasibility issues (tolerences, sheet metal bending, etc.) and the robot is built almost entirely to print, except for some End-Of-Arm-Tooling which is usually prototyped out in the shop.
Edit: 217 Engineers help design a *few *things 
on Cyber Blue the students design almost all parts before they go on the robot. Some assemblies get tweaked and prototyped many times in the shop before a final design is settled on, and because of computer performance issues we often leave out things like chains or bolts, but for the most part the students design most of the parts. Of course, our amazing and talented engineers help out with some of the more technical engineering issues.
oh, btw, we use inventor 11.
We use Inventor 11 for both purposes.
Being that there are only 2 people who use Inventor on the team this year, me being one of them. We graduate this year.
For the most part we use inventor to create basic assemblies to see if ideas work or not, see if it fits in the robot. Most major parts are designed in inventor and places on the chassis to check for fits, then the design can be modified in the machine shop to fit the limitations of our manufacturing team.
Small parts (electronics, screws…ect) are placed in later after assembly.
We are trying to CAD then build… many of our parts this year were CAM driven, so the model is a requirement. We did do a fair number of ‘virtual prototypes’ to shortcut the time required for physical ones. Like this one where we tried to optimize our arm lengths. I think the upload to You Tube took longer than the entire analysis.
Here at 114, we do full CAD work in Inventor before a single tool touches any materials. We find that in the end, the final product looks a lot more planned, and we can discover earlier the plausibility of designs. As for detail work involved, at first the designs used to think up a whole robot are in single parts, or 3 at the most, but we then make the drawing much more complex, down to the single bolts that will go in, in order to check in case some components will interfere.
CAD is the only way to go in a professional environment, which is what we try to emulate here at 114.
We use Auto CAD and only only design parts of the robot that need really detailed design. Like this year. I put the entire arm joint in CAD, but I only did lines for the lifters and we prototyped them in the shop. It’s worked out well.