Autodesk Inventor Award 2007About this year's entry.

Team 177's CADD team is comprised of under a half-dozen members. This is our team's second year competing for the Autodesk Inventor Design Award. Our team's members have all been involved in FIRST for more than one year, and, unfortunately, will all be graduating this year.

The 2007 Bobcat Robotics CADD team is lead by Matt P, "The Mad CADDer," who looked into the requirements for the award in 2006, and discovered that some of the members of Team 177 were proficient in Inventor, and raised enough interest to create a talented team of CADDers. The 2006 season was used mostly as a learning season for our team, as three of the team's members were involved in a CADD class in the school, and one of the team's members had learned all he knew about the software one meeting using the tutorials. A majority of the members of our team had learned the software using Inventor 8, and when it came time to use Inventor 10, we had some major difficulties. The season started off with our members being able to use few features of the program. Around halfway into the season, we learned we needed to make gears for the ball shooter and drive train, and had incredible difficulty with modeling them. Matt learned that there was a component of Inventor we didn't have installed, Design Accelerator, which would allow us to create these components with ease. Also, our team did not know how to use Inventor Studio, resulting in lower quality renders, and a lack of an animation.

2007 was our first year entering as an actual competitive team. 2006, although we were very happy with the result, we did not enter actually expecting to win. In 2007 our team had vastly improved over the previous year. This year, all the students were returning members, not only in Team 177, but members returning to use Inventor competitively for the second year in a row. This year, rather than learning the features of the software during the actual season, we decided to practice during the pre-season time. Also, a few of our members became proficient at using Inventor Studio so when it came time to take renders of the work, we would be able to make them look excellent, and stand out above the other submissions. We also spent time learning to use the Harness tool, to model the wires used on the control board, and throughout the rest of the robot. After the kickoff in January, our team got straight to work, modeling prototypes and designs we had agreed upon before the start of the FIRST season. In fact, over 90% of our robot was modeled in CADD before it was machined. The manufacturers approached the CADDers after the game was announced, asking for specific dimensions for the parts of the robot so that they wouldn't have to spend time drawing it up for themselves.

Unfortunately, along with some huge strides in the abilities of our team members, we were faced with a few hardships. In 2006, our robot's file size was low, and the number and quality of the components used in the model were minimal. In the 2007 though, we spent much more time creating a model as perfect as possible. The result was an excellent model, but with only 512Mb of RAM, and the lack of a graphics card on the school computers we were using, it caused the full assembly of the robot run incredibly slowly, and even crash in the midst of working.

Team 177 is very pleased with the result of this year's work, and would like to wish good luck to the other teams competing for this award.