Inspiring Robot Design Principles for FLL Part 1: If It Is Too Small, Make It Big

This post introduces a useful FLL robot design principle: if your design is too small, make it bigger. We applied this principle to the CITY SHAPER treehouse mission and found that it inspired creative designs for FLL robots and attachments. We hope this EV3 robot design principle will inspire you to create cool attachments as well.

If you’re interested in our reusable MindStorms My Blocks, please check out our posts about EV3 programming. We welcome your feedback and suggestions.

One useful FLL robot design principle is to increase the size of the attachment or the model if it is too small.

CITY SHAPER Treehouse Mission Introduction

 We applied this design principle in 2019 FLL CITY SHAPER robot game.

Mission 5 Treehouse of CITY SHAPER states that if a unit is supported by the Tree’s (Score all that apply)

  • Large Branches: 10 Each Unit
  • Small Branches: 15 Each Unit.

To earn maximum points for the treehouse mission, it’s recommended to place all three blue units on the small branches, which yields 45 points, as shown on the left side of the featured image. However, designing and building an attachment to accomplish this mission can be challenging. Our team also faced difficulties in creating an attachment that could stack three blue units on the small branches. We stuck and had to find a new way.

Apply The Design Principle For Treehouse Mission

Applying the FLL robot design principle of “if it’s too small, make it big,” we attempted to enlarge our model. However, we encountered challenges in placing all three blue units on the small branches as originally intended. After some experimentation, we discovered a new approach: we could stack all three blue units on top of a white unit, as shown on the right side of the featured image. This not only earned us 45 points for the blue units, but an additional 15 points for the white unit, resulting in a total of 60 points for the treehouse mission. 🙂

By making the target model bigger, it was much easier for us to build an attachment to handle. We built an attachment as shown below:

FLL Robot Design
Front View
FLL Robot Design
Side View

With units loaded, the attachment looks like this:

FLL Robot Design
Loaded Attachment

We were thrilled to achieve a total of 65 points (60 points + 5 bonus points) for the treehouse mission using the unique attachment we designed and built. Our experience taught us that when we encounter obstacles, it’s important to think creatively and be willing to try different approaches.

Following the FLL robot design principle of “if it’s too small, make it big” can inspire innovative solutions and help us overcome challenges in FLL robotics design.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Song

    Thank you for your detailed explanation of the design principle.

  2. Terry

    The detail is awesome it gives a lot of ideas of making the attachment better thank you

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