How to plan an FTC build season
Build seasons fail in predictable places: three weeks lost to strategy debate, a redesign started too late to finish, and driver practice that never happened because the robot was never done. A plan does not have to be elaborate to prevent all three.
9 min readKickoff week: decide what you are building toward
Read the game manual — properly, all of it, including the penalties — and then work out the scoring maths before touching a robot. Which scoring action is worth the most per second of cycle time? What does a realistic match score look like? What can you concede entirely?
End the week with a written strategy: the two or three things your robot will do, and the things it will not. The list of what you are not building is the more useful half.
Weeks 2–3: prototype, do not commit
Build rough versions of the hard mechanisms and test them badly on purpose. A cardboard-and-tape intake that proves the geometry works is worth more than a week of CAD on the wrong geometry.
Set a hard date to stop prototyping. Without one, a team will prototype until the week before the qualifier and then assemble something untested.
Weeks 4–6: build the real one
Assign subsystems to small groups with a clear owner each, and make the dependencies explicit — the intake cannot mount until the chassis exists, autonomous cannot be tuned until the drivetrain is final. This is where a task board with dependencies earns its keep: the blocking chain is visible before it bites.
Get a driveable robot early even if it is incomplete. A drivetrain that moves in week four means four extra weeks of driver practice and autonomous work.
Weeks 7–8: stop adding, start finishing
The hardest call of the season is when to stop improving the robot. The rule that works: any new mechanism must be finished and tested at least two weeks before your first event, or it does not get built.
Spend this time on the unglamorous half — wire management, fasteners that stay tight, the autonomous that runs nine times out of ten instead of six.
The last two weeks: practice and prepare
- Drive practice, on a real field element setup, timed. Cycle time improves faster with a driver than with a redesign.
- Run your autonomous twenty times and record how many completed. Fix whatever fails.
- Pack and run your pit checklist as a dry run.
- Finish the portfolio — it is due at the event, not after it.
- Do a full inspection check against the current rules, not last season's.
Keeping the plan alive
A plan written at kickoff and never opened again is decoration. What keeps it real is a short weekly check: what was due, what actually got done, what is now blocked, and what moves. Fifteen minutes.
Put the competition dates in the same place as the tasks so the deadline is never a surprise — the schedule syncs them from FIRST, which also means you find out when an event date changes.
After the first event
Your first competition is the best information you will get all season. Write down what broke, what the good teams did that you did not, and what your scouting notes say about your own robot. Then plan the next six weeks from that rather than from what you assumed at kickoff.