Plate Design

Plates are one of the most important structural elements on a robot. Because of this, we have standards specifications to design them with.

Outer Contour

• Plates' outer contours should be continous (Tangent arcs)

Lightening

Pocketed and Lightened Parts not only are lighter, but they also look much nicer than aluminum sheet. Large plates (Bellypans, etc.) should be lightened with a repeating geometric pattern. An easy one is diamonds. We usually don't lighten Polycarbonate, but for large sheets (Hoppers, Funnels, etc.) you often can go halfway through. To make Pocketed Parts, we use team 2471's Part Lighten Featurescript.