I was curious to see how often people rebuild their robots and how long it normal takes. This is because for the past two years personally we have rebuilt our robot 2 times after we have our first one during the season and I didn’t know if this is normal. Not normal. Or a good or bad habit.
last season I rebuilt a total of 9 times. This is way too many, and the reason we had to go through so many rebuilds is we just couldn’t get a robot to work well enough for us.
This season I’ve only built one robot, but I’ve got through 3 iterations in CAD.
if you aren’t satisfied with the quality and speed of your build, and the thing limiting your performance is the robot itself, not the driving practice or programming, then you should probably rebuild the next opportunity you get. Using CAD helps you make sure each iteration you go through will be a true representation of your current abilities, and will also help to push those abilities farther.
3-4 Builds per season
2-4 Weeks of CAD
1-2 Weeks of Build
I’m on my third rebuild, and I’m currently doing my 4th in CAD. My 4th is the first one I’ve done in CAD, and it’s going much more smoothly than the others, I’ll likely only do one more rebuild if I need, so as to focus on driving and programming.
As I’ve recently discovered.
Yah i have a cad. I went through about 2 interations of the robot that we are currently trying to build. CAD helps out a lot and I wish I learned it earlier.
We are on our 5th or 6th iteration of our robot this season, we just got back into our lab this week from a 2 month break. We anticipate competitions starting in the later season, so we are perfecting everything to avoid a rebuild in the future. Usually competitions create ideas when playing against other teams though. I really hope this is the last version, it seems to be almost perfect in every aspect.
Currently working on my 4th robot iteration (1 tray, 3 snail), and did 2 CADs. This iteration is a mirror bot of the third iteration to make sure everything is smoother and more refined.
7th grade: 0 rebuild, we were bad
8th grade: ditto
9th grade: 1 rebuild, still bad
10th grade: 2 rebuild, alright
11th grade: 2 rebuild, good
12th grade: we’re already on our 4th design
This is only my second year of robotics. We haven’t rebuilt our bot at all this year as it is working well for us so far. We do occasionally rethink and rebuild certain parts of our robot but have yet to completely start from scratch when we already have a functioning bot. It would have been a good idea for my team last year to rebuild, but none of us had the experience, knowledge or time to attempt it.
8th grade: 1 iteration
9th grade: 2-3 building iterations
10th grade: 4-6 building iterations
now: 1, will probably stay at 1-2 thanks to CAD
Last Season we had rebuilt 2 times, once before the new year and the next before provincials. We first rebuilt to make our robot more compact and mechanically simple, as our first bot was very thick and square (?). Our second rebuild was to refine the old design to be even more compact and support additional features such as a tray extender and a quicker flipout, this rebuild intended to help us qualify to worlds.
Currently our team has only rebuilt 1 time, and we are expecting later on to rebuild some more as the meta changes and shapes with the season. The reason mainly being as the first design was us getting a feel of the game and getting the key systems to work, and the second design being a refined version of the first with the knowledge we’ve learned over the time building the first.
Last season we rebuilt a total of 13 times, and most of the rebuilds took 1-2 weeks. We were bad, and it was my first year. This year we are on the third robot, which is the first I have used CAD for
On average my teams rebuilt (the full robot) 4 to 5 times per season.
but all these are not including prototyping and testing of gadgets, etc.
With a robot never reaching perfection we rebuild many times throughout the year we are on our third bot this season, and we are currently CAD the next one. We never turn down the possibility of a rebuild and will probably rebuild at least 3 more times two of those being state and worlds bots.
At least for this year, we’ve stuck to the same robot with just minor incremental improvements. There isn’t really a point in time where we have rebuilt or are planning to fully rebuild. I would recommend doing something similar to help prevent backtracking any previous improvements you may have made to an existing robot. It would also help reserve more time towards aspects like strategic driving and programming functions.
same here
as others said dont just rebuild
refine
TP: 1 rebuild
TT: 2 rebuilds
CU: 1 rebuild so far
Me seeing everyone that has had multiple rebuilds already this season. Me over here had only had 2 practices that are two hours long because our school am has been closed and our new mentor has put barley any practices up.
Bro how do you even do that
We had scrimmages every two weeks, and would try and build a dr4b, fail, and build the same 4 bar robot the day before the scrim then take the bot apart.