Strategic & Mechanical Design

Presenter: Phillip Parker and Dawson Baldwin (5816)

Key Takeaway: Help your team decide what to build and how to build it without lowering your goals.

This workshop combines strategic and mechanical design to show FRC teams how to move from deciding what their robot should do to determine how to build it. Teams will learn how to analyze the game, identify scoring priorities, evaluate ranking points, and choose robot functions based on their goals, resources, people, time, and skills. From there, the workshop covers engineering requirements, design preferences, CAD structure, prototyping, mechanism selection, and fabrication best practices. The goal is to help teams reduce unnecessary complexity, make better decisions earlier, build robots that match their actual capabilities, and create a repeatable design process that leads to faster development, greater reliability, and stronger competitive performance.

About the Presenter:

Phillip Parker with 16 years of FIRST experience and Dawson Baldwin with 9 years of FIRST experience, from FRC 5816 Gra-V Robotics.