Archetype Decision & Layout Sketch for TR ALPHA
The second part of our week 1 has been all about different archetypes. On wednesday we decided what type of skills the robot needed. This says something about WHAT the robot should do. But there are many different HOWs to think of and design.
Here’s where experience from previous seasons comes into play and knowing other robots from different seasons, as well as knowing the resource capabilities of your team. Building within your team’s capabilities is something that we highly recommend and is usually underestimated.
Archetype Decision Process
A team’s capabilities might be quite an abstract topic to grasp. For ourselves we’ve tried dividing it up in a couple attributes with the addition of some technical attributes.
Archetype Attributes
| Attribute |
Explanation |
| Simplicity |
The simplicity of subsystems based on degrees of freedom complexity (1678 method) |
| Driver friendly |
Ease of game piece collection, scoring, and field traversal |
| CoG |
Center of Gravity of the robot in cm from the ground. Low CoG boosts driving performance |
| Knowledge Base |
Reuse or Development of subsystem concepts from previous seasons |
| Manufacturability |
The resources needed to build and repair the subsystems (people, skill level, amount of time, tools) |
| Cost |
The costs of components needed to build subsystems. High costs can lead to the ability of creating less spare parts. |
For each attribute we described 5 different levels. The higher the score the better it is for the overall robot. Check the table below to see how we described the different levels.
Every archetype concept gets judged based on these attributes and awarded with a certain score/level
Attribute Weighted Scoring
Not every attribute is equally important. We’ve given every attribute a weight factor, all the factors added up need to be 1.
So in order of importance:
0.25 – Simplicity
0.2 – Driver Friendly & CoG
0.15 – Knowledge Based
0.1 – Manufacturability & Cost
The Possible Archetypes & Their Scores
We had a team meeting with the entire team on Saturday afternoon. Through a Mentimeter we gathered all the input from all the team members on how they would score the archetype attributes.
Archetype 1
Archetype 2
Archetype 3
Verdict - Archetype 2
After scoring the three archetypes we went over the scores and discussed all the pro’s and con’s of each subsystem once more. The general consensus was that the scores definitely reflected how everyone was feeling in regards to the best fit for this game.
With that input we decided that we wanted to have the Shamper prototype up and running before we fully decided on our final archetype. In our last post you could see that the Shamper was working quite well and thus Archetype 2 will be our choice for our TR Alpha robot.
After a day of working on the sketch and see how everything would fit this is the most recent screenshot:
