I have been wondering: How many teams are actually designing their Robots with an FTC team?
From the kick-off video, it seemed to me that they really wanted you to work with an FTC team. However, I highly doubt that every team will be able to find an FTC team to work with to design a minibot.
So: How is your team doing it?
We doesn’t!
There is no one Brazilian team in FTC competition, and it gets worse: we can’t buy the specific motors and the battery here.
The only way is import these items from USA, but it’ll take around 3 weeks to receive them 
Ouch, It would have been so much better if FIRST gave teams the batteries and motors for reasons like this.
Back to the original question though. At our school, the FRC team IS the FTC team (it’s not a very big team either). Last year was the first year we built an FTC robot in addition to an FRC robot. This year, it seems like we’re building three, if not more.
I’m speaking for my past team but we actually got some of the vex kits in the past and would use those for pre season activities to try out different drivetrains, get new members introduced to programming, with the easier smaller scale robot instead of having to do the large scale fabrication. I don’t know if they have used them the past couple years but I found it helpful and also helped us understand the thinking of an FTC team.
I know around where they are located there isnt an FTC team nearby but I don’t think it would hurt to check out videos on YouTube as well as FTC teams to see how they have approached stuff as they have had similar problems in the past with different types of climbing
1727 has dabbled in FTC, but mostly Vex. We use smaller robotics systems like those to train our new members. Our minibot probably won’t resemble an FTC robot at all, more likely it will be a metal strut, two wheels , two motors, and a battery.
461 is using a FTC team because our school makes the freshmen do either Vex or FTC first so there are ~6 people who know what they are doing…
My team doesn’t have an FTC team, so we will be making it ourselves.
our team actually is the FTC That is making its way into FRC one the school builds more support it will probably seperate some but as for now they are sticking to all for both
We actually doubled as an FTC team last year, so this year we just took the FTC parts out of storage and started to work with those.
We’re using the minibot in 2 ways: (1) as a transition for our 2nd-year FTC students in order to get them excited about FRC next year, and (2) as a way for last year’s FTC team who made it to FTC champ division finals to come full circle in iterative design with lessons learned. They also get to expand their knowledge by having to interface the minibot with the FRC bot via a ‘smart’ deployment mechanism.
The 2nd-year FTC students still have FTC competitions of their own, hence we won’t let them do FRC 100% right now.
Aiken County Robotics has 3 FTC teams which all of the members are part of the 1102 M’Aiken Magic. So you could say yes. We are going to have FTC expertise in this area.
We only do VEX so we are designing the MB without a FTC Team.
There are no local FTC teams here.