Computer Aided Design (CAD) is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to plan, create, and maintain the robots that our team build. CAD allows our team to begin building more complex components and mechanisms with the confidence that it would work.

There are many CAD solutions available, however our team has elected to use Onshape. Onshape is a web-hosted CAD and project management tool that is widely regarded as the Google Drive of CAD. It allows for significantly easier and more efficient collaboration than any other CAD solution. Several of the many advantages of Onshape include the lack of installs and updates of large programs, easy to acquire educational licenses, and live changes that appear for everyone if one person changes a feature or part. In addition, since Onshape is not just a CAD tool, it allows files such as text or images to be uploaded and viewed all in the same environment. There are even extensions that allow web pages to be embedded for easy access