Design for Competition

What happens to a robot during a competition?

it gets abused that is the simple answer to the question, the robot gets abused during the competition.

Once you are ready to make competition parts there are several additional design criteria you need to think about to make your robot last for the entire competition season (100 hours of heavy use). so to do this there are several things you need to change in your design to make this work.

Things to think about in your design

Design for Robustness & Weight

• Remove all test and prototyping holes and slots
• Add tuning holes and slots
  • during your prototyping you may have discovered some tweaking may be needed to get the machine and the math to match up. add in slides and slots to account for this manual tweaking.
• Add strength where you need it
  • Identify areas that bend or have lots of stress put on them
  • Step up your bolts or rivets 1 size in these areas
  • Use thicker materials
  • Try and remove as many hard corners as you can and replace them with filleted corners
• Remove weight where its not needed
  • Do you really need #35 chain where you have it? can it be #25?
  • Calculate sheer point of all moving parts and fasteners.

Design for Repair & Assembly

• Use common parts
  • #8, #10, and 1/4-20 bolts
• Think about how the build team is going to assemble your design.
  • Add access holes and look for areas where a tool and hand may not be able to fit
• Think about how to repair your design.
  • Putting your chain inside of a tube or box is a great way to protect it from damage but it makes it very hard to fix in the heat of the competition
  • To repair your design do we need to remove other working designs on the robot? this is normally a bad thing.
  • Can your design be fixed on the robot? or does it need to be designed to be easily removable and spares brought to the competition?
  • Create a list of the spare parts and assembly's you need on hand to repair your design.
• Think about wear of the parts and a replacement schedule
  • If you use rollers or wheels how often should they be replaced
  • Is there a way to clean or maintain your design to extend the replacement schedule

Design for Control & Safety

• Calculate safe limits for your design
  • Mechanical Speed range at the axil
  • Current of the motors.
  • Try and figure out how the controls team can determine if your design has broken on field.