Design Process

Design Process

The new FTC game has been announced for the year and your team is ready to build a robot. Now what? This article lists a possible set of steps that can be followed to build a great robot. It begins with generating ideas and ends with a functional robot 1 week before the first match.

1) Ideas - As a team we review the rules and brainstorm ideas to achieve game points. Use BrainWriting and BrainSwarming. The result is a chart with points at the top connected to ideas that can achieve the points. The ideas connect to robot resources needed to make the idea work. Write specific ideas down in a paper log book. See the HBR video on how do do Brainswarming to learn more.
2) Robot Story - As robot drivers, we develop a story of what what our robot does to score points during the game. Consider the autonomous, driver period, and end game. Write the story down for your team to review and to work from. After we have a basic story of what the robot does, think about what other teams will do to defend against your strategy. Present the story to the entire team. Use a top-down picture of the field and of the field elements to talk through the story. The team asks questions, offers up new ideas to add to the brainswarm chart, and considers what other teams may do to defend against the story. Write robot story and defense story down in a paper log book.
3) Design Constraints - As robot drivers, develop a list of design constraints from the story. Think about how fast, how reliably, how big/small. Review the results as a team. Write the design constraints down in a paper log book.
5) Paper Prototype Demo - The design teams take the list of ideas, the game story, and the design constraints and develops paper prototypes of the design they want. All paper prototypes are logged in the paper log book. Design is done at the module level. The frame module is detailed out first using a paper prototype. The shape of the frame must match the strategy picked by the team. Everything else will be built on this. Drive modules computing/electronics modules, and scoring module ideas fight for space on the robot frame. The paper prototype is demoed to the entire team. The group talks their way through the drive strategy and design constraints using the paper prototype as a visual. Take pictures of the paper prototypes. Put the pictures in the paper log book along with prototype descriptions.
6) Detailed Design - From paper prototypes, the team uses a CAD tool to create a detailed design for non-standard parts. CAD drawings can also be created of each module for documentation and for future re-use.
7) Working Prototype Demos - Paper prototypes and CAD drawings are turned into the working prototypes. Working prototypes result in a working demo to the entire team. The general sequence of working prototypes is a) Frame complete with discussion of where modules will hang. b) First move demo. (Add drive module, computer module, wiring, and drive software). c) First field demo. (Add one module to interact with a field element.) Demo one small part of the drive story. Repeat for each additional portion of the drive story. At the end of each demo, do a retrospective on what worked well (robot and process) and what can be improved for the next demo. Winning robots build modules that optimize the key design constraints around their story better than other robots.
8) Game Robot Demo - Select a date sometime before the first match (maybe 3 weeks). Each design module team and the SW team decides what is reasonable to have done 1 week before the first match. Prioritize the work that will be done to make sure the most important parts of the robot story work. All CAD design parts need to be complete and attached to their modules. Parts that are not very reliable should have duplicates made for the game match.