LEGO Digital Designer

There is an application called LEGO Digital Designer available at ldd.lego.com. This allows you to design your robot on the computer using standard Lego pieces. This type of software is called "Computer Aided Design" or "CAD," for short.

I'm not certain that it is actually faster to design your robot using this CAD software. However, you could always make a CAD drawing of your design after you build the robot. This would be good way to document your design and would give you something to show the judges at the tournament.

Here's a picture of my robot...it's a pretty simple design, just to show you that it is possible. (The pictures are "screen shots" of the computer screen).