At the White Bear High School construction site, the engineers of Kraus-Anderson taught us about how they organize the construction of a building. We learned that they often order custom parts. Many of the custom parts in this build are used for both structural and aesthetic reasons. They also taught us about their imaging systems which utilize a laser, camera, and drone to help layout the plans for buildings. The information from these devices can even be put into a CAD to help with planning. They showed us how they plan out everything about a building before starting to construct it which is a strategy we are going to use next season. We learned a lot from our tour and discovered many similarities between commercial construction and the FTC build season. For example, we both go through full designs before commencing with the physical construction process. Kraus-Anderson also CADs out their buildings in a similar way to how we use Fusion to CAD our robot. The tour was very interesting and we hope to be able to see the school again once they’ve finished it.

Our team spoke to the Kraus-Anderson engineers about our previous two seasons. We showed them a video of our robot and explained the FTC program. We told them about our various uses of CAD and custom parts. We also explained the FTC game to them and described how we work through the season to build the robot.