Brainstorming Designs
If you happen to have these questions:
How do I go from a blank slate to a working design? How do I find the most effective design? Where do I even start?
Fear not fellow reader, I'm going to go through the full process of how we create designs!
Team & Robot Goals
Before kickoff, the team sits down and comes up with the goals for the team for the coming season. For this lesson we are specifically focusing on the team goal for the robot, which in the case of the 2024 season, was to make a world's competing robot. This sets the standard for what the overall aim of the design should head towards.
As soon as the game for the new season is announced, the team gets to work learning the rules and coming up with strategy. Through the course of 2 days, scouting comes up with the robot goals that they believe must be achieved in order to meet the team goal of being a world's competing robot.
If you want to know more about how scouting comes up with the strategy, checkout their page about the development of the robot goals. (Link here)
It is imperative that all CAD students know the rules to a great degree (knowing the rules beforehand can save a lot of design time), and hammer the team & robot goals to heart. You can't make a world's winning robot if you don't believe you can.
You probably have noticed that I use both robot goals & robot constraints throughout the CAD documentation. Those 2 terms are not interchangeable! Robot goals is what the team believes the robot should be able to perform within the game in order to accomplish the team goal. Robot constraints is what the robot must absolutely be able to do in order to meet a robot goal. Here's two examples:
Robot Goal 1: The robot must be able to do 4 - 6 cycles per match.
Robot Constraint 1a: The robot must have a travel speed of ≥ 1.2 m/s
Robot Constraint 1b: The robot must be able to pick up note within 5 seconds
Robot Constraint 1c: The robot must be able to score on average within 6 seconds.
In this example you can see that a goal is more of a vision for what the robot should be able to do, while the constraint is what the robot must have in order to accomplish the goal. Notice how relaxed the constraints for this goal are. These relationships can get more complex as the goals get more ambitious:
Robot Goal 2: The robot must be able to do 10 - 12 cycles per match
Robot Constraint 2a: The robot must be swerve drive (To accomplish the travel path, it is necessary)
Robot Constraint 2b: The robot must have a travel speed of ≥ 2.7 m/s
Robot Constraint 2c: The robot total weight must be < 115lb (For faster acceleration)
Robot Constraint 2d: The robot structure height cannot exceed 32in (To be able to drive under the stage)
Robot Constraint 2e: The robot must be < 28 x 28 in (To be able to drive under the stage)
Robot Constraint 2f: The robot must be able to pick up a note within 1.5 seconds
Robot Constraint 2g: The robot must be able to score on average within 2 seconds
Phew! See how many more constraints you need as the goals get more ambitious?
CAD's job is to figure out what constraints are necessary to accomplish the robot goal's set by scouting & the rest of the team. It is also important to voice concerns to the team if the constraints necessary to accomplish such a feat could impact the design time of the robot / could be out of the scope of the team.
As soon as the goals and constraints for the robot are put in place, it's now time for CAD to get to work creating designs that fit the constraints that were agreed upon.
AP Research
As boring as it may sound, all designs start with a little research. Based on the given constraints your job as a designer is to figure out something that accomplishes the constraints set by the team. This is where experience really outshines anything else. By being observant of other robots at competitions in the past, you develop a sense of knowing what kind of mechanisms and different solutions other teams have developed over the years for problems that you may similarly be facing. Of course, there are resources to help you out as well:
- FUN Robotics Network (opens in a new tab)
- FRC Design (opens in a new tab)
- Blue Alliance (opens in a new tab)
- Global CAD Collection (opens in a new tab)
- Spectrum CAD Collection (opens in a new tab)
- Anything from any other team's websites (I find team 254's season handbooks very useful)
- Simply just watching matches from previous years that match similar tasks that you have to find a solution to
Once you find a few robots for inspiration, try to see if there are CAD models for that specific robot. Chef's kiss if there is cuz you know exactly what happens next:
hippity hoppity, ur CAD is now my property
Using the designs you find, this is where prototyping comes into play to check the feasibility of the design.
Trade Study
(This section will be updated for the new method this season)
Generally after the prototyping phase is over, we immediately move into the rating phase where we put all the mechanisms that we want to compare into a table with categories to rate from 1 to 5.
After completing the trade study, the final design direction is chosen and CAD begins the grind.