This survey is to see how good you are at figuring out your complete date and to get a consensus of when other teams plan on completeing their robot. Please feel free to follow up with your success dates.
We plan to finish early. Murphy’s law therefore dictates that we will be drilling holes in the chassis to make the weight limit at the end of the first day of Regionals.
We would expect our bot to be done by Week 5, but usually its about a day or two before shipping and then the ever-famous “all nite programmin’ n driva trainin’” is done.
Dreamland: Week 4.
Realistically: Week 5
If something screws up: Week 6
Our build schedule always say that we would finish something by week for, and have week 5-6 for debugging and practice, but well, we never make the deadline. Good thing we still got Thursday.
Which something always does… at least twice. I’m having to go with last minute changes… 
Complete!?! You guys actually finish? “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings!” I haven’t heard any music yet. That sound you hear is a student on the mechanical team trying to get out of the shipping crate you closed too early.
To the extent that FIRST is about building robots, it’s about building robots. Not about having built them.
Our 2004 robot was “complete” for competition on the last day of the Championship.
I think that we finally perfected our robot the day after the off-season competition bash at the beach
What’s this about 5:00am on the ship date? Its not over until the truck comes to pick it up - more like 4-5pm on the ship date!
Actually, were usually not done until the second or last day of nationals - at least for the last two years I have participated in FIRST.
We usually finish up about a week before ship, maybe a little closer…most of the time though we have a working base and sometimes a prototype for the rest of the bot so that our drivers can work on getting used to how it handles.
We plan to be completely done with everything except programming on the 16th of February.
Suprisingly enough… our robot was finished 3 weeks into the the season and another 1 week was used to figure out all of the problems and fix them. We used the rest of the time to do driver practice as well as strategy work…
GO 1403!!!
What’s your secret? We always have “strict” deadlines, and we work as hard as we can to meet them, but if the robot is driving at midnight the day before shipping, we feel lucky. Somehow we always seem to fall behind. Does your team have any kind of an organizational structure? Timelines? Do you pick simple, solid designs? Is it lucky team dynamics? Honestly though, if you have any advice, our team could use it. Thanks!
I would feel disappointed to finish that early. Finishing at week 3 or 4 would be like you did not challenge yourself enough. driver practice and strategy work is definitely a good thing, but you may have been able to do more with your machine.
Our team is organized, but it all depends on the season, game, and what types of things we are trying to do in the game. Like, last year, we tried to do everything except the bar. We try to get our robot done before PlayDate in DC, which is at the National Building Museum. Fun!
Their robot was mostly built out of wood, and it was made extremely simple. I can see how they finished it that early. They sure had an excellent rookie year.
Finish… what an interesting concept. I’m still hoping to do that to our 2003 bot. 
I selected week 5 because I think my team might be able to do that this year, we’ll just have to be a bit more organized. Although I don’t think a robot is ever really finished per se, there’s always room for improvement.
I sort of disagree there. I feel that getting the basic robot done as soon as possible is very important. The earlier you finish, the more comfortable your drivers can get with the robot and you can also tweak it a little. Last year for us, the programmers didn’t really get the robot until Chesapeake and our drivers didn’t get to drive a fully functioning machine until Drexel really. I feel that this really hurt our performance on the field.
I firmly believe that an elite level FIRST robot can be completed in 4 weeks. I don’t think the fact that a team finished within that timeline is the indicator of a team who hasn’t challenged themselves. I think it’s a better indicator of the following two things.
- A well oiled “machine” – To finish a robot that quickly requires a lot of subteams working independently, followed by these teams seamlessly integrating their work.
- A firm understanding of the importance of driver training. – There’s no better way to gain a leg up on the competition than by having well practiced drivers. Especially during the first few weeks of the regional season, practiced drivers with an adequate robot tend to beat unpracticed drivers with a superior robot.
This is why I recommend that all teams try and finish their robot within a four week time frame. It encourages team work, and puts you a team in position where they’ve maximized their chance of winning.
I’ve detailed a lot of these thoughts in a workshop that I gave to local teams in Ontario. It can be found on this page. It’s in the “Running A Team” presentation.