As a member of FIRST Robotics Competition team 3663, I was part of the sub-team that designed and built our robot for the 2019 competition season. After learning what our robot would be required to do, we had 6 weeks to go from vague concepts to a working final robot. I personally did a significant amount of the detailed design for our robot using SolidWorks, creating a CAD model that included all the mechanical functions of our robot and making 2D drawings for manufacturing team members to work from. Since I was the only team member doing CAD, I had a personal hand in every aspect of the robot's physical design.
I started with 2D sketches to work out the basic mechanical motions of the robot, then moved on to more specific design in 3 dimensional space. I started with a standard parts library I had compiled over the summer and used configurations to bring those components into different assemblies. By its final iteration, the full assembly contained approximately 800 individual components. There were many challenges working with such a large assembly; careful mating and judicious use of sub-assemblies was essential to keeping it manageable.
We completed our robot within our 6 week time window and competed in the 2019 FRC competition. Mechanically our robot was very robust, though we did need to go through a few iterations in some areas of our design. We won the Industrial Design Award for our elevator and manipulator design at our second competition and eventually competed at the World Championship in Houston, TX.