As my team looks ahead to future seasons, I’m interested in finding out more about the kitbot as a potential project for first-year members. Specifics I’m interested in finding out about from teams who have built kitbots in the last 5-6 years:
- Are the kitbot dimensions generally the same from year to year?
- On average, how long does it take your team to assemble the kitbot?
- How much fabrication knowledge do your members need before building the kitbot?
- For those of you who have used a swerve drivebase with a kitbot superstructure: what are the things you had to modify to make that work?
A little more background:
My team has opted out of the black tote for as long as I’ve been a mentor, but we’ve seen an influx of new members this year who don’t have much robotics or mechanical experience. We also have a decently resourced machine shop, and enough older swerve modules from our previous robots to build a drivetrain. We’d primarily used this for a test bed / prototyping robot / offseason project in the past.
One thing I am wondering about is whether it makes sense to have new members build a bare-bones swerve drivebase during the pre-season (October-December), and then build the kitbox superstructure on top of it, whether by opting into the black tote, or just buying the other parts ala carte.
Thanks for any help & recommendations you can offer!
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Not a direct answer to your question but the sister, rookie team of freshmen and some sophomores built THIS this year (actually a few times - there are some extra holes). They were 8th alliance captain.
This is all game dependent and we only have two samples to go from so far, but relatively the same size. The chassis kit itself changed this season with extra holes in a few places. If you tried to reuse the exact same chassis as the 2024 KitBot from Crescendo you would need the new side plates, or manually punch the new holes through.
For answering 2 and 3 we can have the KitBot built with 2 or 3 focused students in 4 meetings (2 week nights 6:30-9 and 2 Saturdays 12-5). That was the same case last year, even though we had to manufacture some of the brackets ourselves. This season the process should be faster for most teams and the Kit actually had them this time.
Experience is not needed, but an adult/student lead who has built the chassis before or will follow every detail of the instructions to the letter is best. There are steps that are easy to get backwards or one/two holes off and not catch it until the very end. I’d also recommend watching the FIM KitBot assembly videos. They are a great visual guide to follow along if the instructions book alone isn’t enough.
Our team builds the KitBot and our regular custom bots both for the practice and as a backup plan if something catastrophic happens. For the price of not getting that opt out coupon, I like having the peace of mind. Even pre KitBot we always took the chassis just in case and had students practice assembly and wiring
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Thank you! I am definitely watching things like Everybot, REV FRC Starter Bot, and WCP Competitive Concept carefully as well.
The advantage I see for the Kitbot has is that both the assembly instructions and parts themselves are guaranteed to be out at the very beginning of the season, which means first year students could begin working on it immediately, where the other designs (including Ri3D) aren’t available quite as early. My perception is that it’s also really well documented, including the new Kitbot Enhancement/Iteration Guide (which I really liked).
Thank you, that is great information!
I had a LOT of freshlings this year, and our chief complaint last year was “not enough hands-on robot time”. Additional $$ came in and voila, new JV team created 
The JV kids built the kitbot pretty quickly (the only real annoyance was that the AM14U overall -dimensions- were not called out. You MUST saw the rails down; we had to back that out of the bumper instructions.
After that was driving the kids worked on notching it up. They actually did better at Belton than our varsity team, and picked them in alliance selection 
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