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Built to Fight: What It Takes to Engineer a 40 kW Combat Robot
At a Glance
How Team Ribbot designs custom electronics inside a demanding mechanical product, as a distributed team with no spare hours, and what any hardware team can take from the way they work.
Every hardware team designing electronics inside a real mechanical product runs into the same problem: the board needs one thing, the enclosure needs another, and the engineers responsible are looking at the same physical space from opposite directions. How fast and accurately a team can work through that conflict determines whether the design ships on time or gets stuck in a slow, error-prone loop.
Team Ribbot designs one of the most mechanically demanding products in existence: a 250-pound, 40 kW combat robot built for the BattleBots Pro League. Six engineers, five states, after-hours builds, and a hard deadline every competition season. No room for expensive surprises.
This ebook follows their design process through the hardest problem on the robot, and the workflow decisions that let a fully distributed team reach first-time-right results within the hours they have available.
What's Inside
- The real cost of file-based handoff workflows
- What real concurrent engineering requires
- Why data accuracy between tools matters as much as speed
- How first-time-right becomes an economic strategy
Key Benefits of MCAD CoDesign
- Faster iteration between electrical and mechanical teams, without file transfers or version confusion
- Selective change control so engineers accept only the updates they want, without losing good work
- A single source of truth across the whole team, wherever they are working from
- High-fidelity data transfer that keeps geometry, component identity, and design intelligence intact between tools
Why Engineers Trust MCAD CoDesign
"Everything went together the first time, with no surprises. We attribute that directly to how thoroughly the CAD models were developed and how well the electronics were built out before anything was ordered." — Team Ribbot, BattleBots Pro League
Related Resources
Related Technical Documentation
Solutions for Every Role and Team
- Discover and evaluate design options earlier
- Develop in one shared workspace
- Scale with control and compliance
- Connect every stage of hardware development
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