Designing Competitive FTC Robots: From Strategy to Robot Excellence

Are you new to engineering design and facing a major design challenge? Perhaps you are a member of an FTC (FIRST® Tech Challenge) or similar team that must build a robot to compete with other robots. Clearly, you want your robot to be competitive and respected by your peers. You would like your robot to have novel features so it stands out from others. Ideally, your robot will show elements of excellence in every competition. Achieving excellence requires competent engineering design.
Engineering design is the application of creativity and judgment along a journey from a stated challenge (a robot game) to a finished product (competition robot) meeting that challenge. What is this journey? If you are new to design, you might simply take four steps: define the challenge, generate ideas, prototype the solution, and finalize the solution. However, if you are more experienced, you probably will take many different design steps that draw on your team’s creativity and judgment as you create a robot of excellence. So, do not despair. You can design a competition robot that fits you and your team’s capabilities!
This book is written to guide teams in the design of a competition robot. It is organized into two sections: Robot Design (Chapters 1-5) and FTC Robot Development Journey (Chapters 6-8).
The first chapter lays a foundation for design suitable for teams relatively new to design. It describes four stages of design and gives robot design examples. It ends with a simple design project that illustrates these four stages of design. Chapters 2 through 5 describe 12 design steps that can be used within the four stages of design. These chapters include many examples drawn from coaching the FTC 7129 Robo Raiders team for many years. Review questions with answers are included in these chapters to aid learning. Templates for design reviews are provided to help you obtain outside reviews of your robot design to make it better.
Chapters 6 and 7 guide you in applying the design process to the FTC robotics competition context. Chapter 6 helps you focus your design effort to create a minimum viable robot, with a limited set of capabilities, for the first competition only a few weeks away. Chapter 7 helps you focus on improvements that are feasible for the next competition. Chapter 8 helps you communicate your robot development journey to others.
In all, this book helps you design a robot that is viable and excellent at each competition during a season. It also helps you communicate your robot development journey so that your team is recognized properly for your robot development achievements.