During the off season of FRC after my first year on the team, I was tasked with leading the Solidworks XDesign Challenge submission. I learned Solidworks XDesign from scratch, making a futuristic lunar lander in 4 weeks. The lander was deigned to rescue one of our FRC robots that was stranded in space. It had mechanical spider legs, hinged gull wing doors, an actuated solar panel array, a retractable ramp, aerospike rocket motors, and reaction control thrusters. The inspiration for the body’s unique shape was our team’s use of the nonagon, the 9 sided shape which makes many appearances on each robot we build.
Designing the lunar lander, my teammate and I had to be agile, collaborative, and creative! To design on a team, we had to employ what we had learned from robotics and segment the rover into sub-assemblies, and ensure that all sub-assemblies could be brought together into the main assembly as we designed. We produced an assembly with proper constraints and was highly parametric.
We were awarded second place for the design, and my teammate and I were invited to speak at Solidworks Worlds 2019 to discuss collaboration in design and to highlight education efforts by Solidworks. We were also invited to have a booth during the Solidworks Worlds convention, showcasing our 2018 FRC robot Uppercut! I spent several hours in the booth, talking to professional engineers, design team leaders, and just running our robot through some scoring drills.
