As a team without long history and thick inheritance, what structures can I let my teammates design to improve our ability of designation and, at the same time, accumulate some structures which our team may use in the future seasons.
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I* would wager an elevator would be a useful thing to design for the upcoming season.
*I have no first hand or insider knowledge of next season.
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Crosses fingers that a large single arm becomes a common/viable mechanism in a not-so-distant future FRC game. I desperately want to work on something like a PINK or 2011 style arm 
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We have designed an elevator, so what also can we design.
I believe these structures, since not COTS, would not be able to be used in season (and instead you’d have to refabricate them).
That being said, I’m a fan of going the full integration route. Can your students design, CAD, manufacture, and assemble an entire (simple) 2018 bot? The game pieces are just milk crates and should be easy to get ahold of, and this will give you practice for elevators and pick’n’place manipulators. You could also put a nested tube climber on it if you wanted to practice that instead of climbing on the elevator.
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That would be a good way to let teammates become familiar with the full integration route, but what can I do if I want them design more instead of copying.
Honestly? Let them copy.
FRC is a “steal from the best, invent the rest” competition. One of the absolute best ways to learn is to build a phenomenal team’s mechanism or robot to learn the decisions they made. Ask @waialua359 - 359 brought a 3310 clone to champs. In 2021, I think 1678 built two separate clones (2910 and 4414). Your students will still get a ton of valuable experience in the integration, manufacturing, and assembly process.
If you feel like they’re ready to succeed when designing from scratch, give them reference CAD/drawings to work off of. It’s not like you can’t look at good examples in season too (and you definitely should).
If I was in charge of building a 2018 robot right now, I’d start by slapping four SDS modules into a square, copy-paste a GreyT elevator on one end, and then spend my energy making the claw as good as possible and giving my drivers and programming team lots of extra time.
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Maybe a grasping intake instead of a roller for balls. A claw if you will. Though our 2019 claw also had rollers. Something for your elevator where you can lift something up it you have grabbed.
You may want to look at conveyors and piece handoff. For 2018 our intake was our placement as well, but you can have your intake hand off to your placement device.
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A great example of this from 2018 (IMO) was 971’s robot. They had an intake separate from their main arm. The intake positioned the cubes into a consistent/known location that their arm/claw could then pick up from each time.
As someone who is very familiar with 233, Pink Arms are some of the most incredibly sleek but complicated things I have ever seen in FRC. Their 2008 implementation remains one of the most impressive things I have ever seen made in FIRST especially for the time.
That being said even 233 themselves switched to an elevator for 2018 and 2019 (there were tons of factors to this decision). While there is of course examples of teams finding success using arms over elevators in these games (pink or otherwise) the reasons elevators have become the standard (and also why we don’t have giant Kuka Arms in buildings to get to other floors) is because of the ease of packaging, the reliability and the ease of repair.
Sigh… I know… 
. Doesn’t change the thought that it would be a ton of fun 
. Just likely not the most practical design to pursue (especially considering my current teams’ resources).
That sounds way better than anything we have currently! All in favour of requiring new buildings to use Kuka Arms instead of elevators say “I” 
I always believe the best system to design and familiarize yourself with is a drivetrain. It’s integral to every game and it’s better to have an amazing drivetrain first and mediocre intakes/placers than vice versa. You always need a drivetrain in every game.
This depends heavily on the team too though. The argument can (and probably should) be made that many teams would benefit more from a well thought out intake/primary mechanism placed on a KOP drivetrain, rather than spending precious time designing/building a custom drivetrain.
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I second this: One of the best ways to learn design is to just build something designed well.
Just straight up building an everybot in the offseason is great experience for new people, and allows you to have an extra robot to compete at an offseason with. Double drive time is great, because you can be training next season’s drive team and allowing new student to try driving.
At this point in the season, just knowing how to build your drivetrain like the back of your hand (wait, I didn’t realize I had that mole there) is super beneficial. Having a drive base robot to test actual prototypes on is super beneficial. I discuss some of the benefits in this thread. 6 weeks of driver practice will let you smoke the competition, regardless of what’s on top of it.
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Thanks for the support. You mentioned some reasons that was exactly why we did it.
Mahalo to Paul, Brian and 3310 for assisting in this effort.
I can tell you, it made it possible for us to do the impossible where we learned very different techniques of design, fabrication, no use of pneumatics, new software (Java), and other valuable techniques in a matter of 3 busy months.
I’ve asked our team if they would be onboard for us doing this every summer with a different elite team robot who is willing to share. We have a team we already asked for next summer 2023.
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Two words: Swerve Drive.
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Might not be what you are looking for but a well designed pit and a sorted toolbox can make a huge difference at a competition.
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I plan to have my students simply design a 2011 robot before this season.
it will be good practice for everything. and theres a few good ways to go about it.
and pretty much the entire community here expects the next game to be something pick and place ish. (that doesn’t mean we are right lol)
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Why not do what we did going with the current game (different robot), so that you can give your team experience in the current off-season, and to prepare for the next?
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Less source material that they know how to find. The shooter game like this is relatively solved. And i know generally the tube placing game is solved also, but the current students havent seen an elevator at all besides our 2018 robot that is still hanging around.
If we did this year many of the kids could potentially find another teams robot and go off that. Plus theres the element of speculation. I dont expect next year to be another shooter game. Figured this may be more relative at this moment