GENERAL ROBOT DESIGN
Simple advice
- Completely design your robot in your notebook before building it.
- Read up on the inspection checklist and make sure your robot will not break any rules.
- Design it to score as many points as possible as quickly and efficiently as possible
- It must fit within an 18" cube easily to pass inspection, but it can (and most likely will) expand out of that size. Design your robot to be 17" so it will pass inspection. It is not fun to fail inspection.
- Don't be afraid to use resources such as YouTube or the VEX Forum to help you brainstorm ideas...If something is working for a lot of other people, you may be able to make your own version that works for you.
- Be unique in your design, it helps you learn and impresses the judges
- Robot speed makes a huge difference in most competitions
- Make things simple as possible without leaving out important features
- How your robot looks makes it seem more impressive and makes you more approachable by alliances during alliance selection
- There are many correct solutions to each problem in your design, figure out a few different ways to solve things
- It seems a bit hard to do at times, but going through the full design process (on paper) that you learned in engineering really helps and a design notebook looks really good.
- There will be time that compromise is needed. You will get times when people have differing ideas, and you will need to take a step back and see what will be best in the long run and will make the most people happy. Talk about your designs with fellow team members and get feedback from each other.
- Have one person that documents everything your team does in a design notebook to show the judges and other people.
Mechanical Tips
- Aluminum is worth the price. Although there is no maximum weight limit, you should make your robot as lightweight as possible.
- If you think that it will be to your advantage, try using pneumatic pistons or other complex mechanisms to score more points
- Use the low friction bearings any time you have a drive shaft going through the metal (very important!)
- The motors aren't very powerful and have their limits
- Make sure your chassis (the area where the wheels mount) is extremely strong because it bears the full weight of your robot
- Find points of movement on your robot that have high amounts of friction, and try to do what you can to reduce friction
- If you build large gear ratios, the greater distance