How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Hey All,

I haven't posted on Chief Delphi in a while, but I was on FIRST Team 1899 back in the 08/09 season (Lunacy). During that season, I started a VEX Robotics team, and managed to take a team from zero to quarterfinals at VEX World Championships in 10 weeks.

I've started writing a bit about technology lately, and wrote an article about how to win a robotics competition -- some of the lessons we learned while competing.

Let me know what you think!

http://blog.studentrnd.org/post/3625...cs-competition

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Many of the points that you bring up are very great, and something that I continually stress to the kids on my former team:

-- Building a simple and robust, yet effective robot is key to doing well at competition.
-- Practice, Practice, Practice! This is the main thing that separates average teams from the powerhouse teams.

Thanks for sharing this, I will be sure to pass it down to the members of our team.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

And another big factor in winning.


Luck.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Yep.

Luck in who's available to be picked during selections.
Luck in that the right positions on the field were chosen for any given moment during a match, knowing only slivers of information before a match starts.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

It would be really great if someone did a "How to win a robotics competition" 30 second video spot, modeled after the Dodge Dart commercials.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

I definitely agree with your first two points.

1. Build robust, easy to maintain machines.
Defense is taken to a whole new level during elimination matches, and their is very little time to put things back together. If we don't think your machine will hold up, we can't pick you to join our alliance.

2. Practice Driving.
Driving practice is a huge advantage, especially at earlier tournaments where even the best machines are in their first event. A well driven machine also makes an attractive defender for someone's pick-list (even if you've not taken the opportunity to play any defense during qualification rounds.) The chemistry on your drive team also leaves an impression.

On point 3...

3. Don't worry about ranking, just win.
If you're just trying to impress scouts maybe that works. As a potential captain you've got to play the raking system given. Intentionally ignoring it, especially when discussing pre-match strategy, makes the team seem uneducated. Negotiate a tolerance threshold with your alliance that balances the priority for winning with maximizing your seeding. Even better if you can incorporate scouting data from previous matches into how that threshold is calculated.

Additional Points...

4. As you eluded in your article, be prepared to be a captain. There are surprises in the top 8 every year. If a team is absolutely too small to scout then here are a couple of ways to get some data...
a. Set up a camera to record a full field view of the matches and then review at least the most recent 2 matches for each robot Friday night. It can make for a long evening, but some people really enjoy that kind of film study.
b. Tour every pit before the end of Friday and get to know what is available to you on the pick-list.
c. At least come to the tournament with a pre-list where you predict how good each team will do. At the World Championship that is fairly easy considering how much data is available to you.

5. Luck... "Chance favors only the prepared mind."
No one wins a regional by being lucky, but great teams can lose regionals by being unlucky. The qualification schedule can be a cruel thing. As long as you can guarantee that you have a great robot the odds will always favor your alliance having more great robots than the randomly assembled opposition. Sometimes the match-ups just don't work out. Sometimes a poorly driven robot on your qualification alliance goes on a penalty fest. Sometimes a weaker robot winds up as one of the top alliance captains and you can't say no to their invitation. And sometimes no matter how bad you think your situation is, the other side has worse luck and you still win. No point in giving up too early.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

I've heard that luck is something that requires having developed the ability to achieve something, and seizing every available opportunity in hopes of achieving it. Take that for what it's worth, I guess.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

I'm not a scouting expert, but I think people tend to overcomplicate scouting with incredible amounts of data.

At a robotics tournament, the main difficulty with scouting is because there's way too much data on everyone's robot, and it's hard to process all of that data.

In my opinion, robots that I've seen fall into three categories (especially at FRC regional tournaments):

• Definitely want on our alliance
• Maybe...
• No way!

There's a LOT of "Maybe" and "No ways". Usually your first pick is pretty obvious, but the main problem is -- for your second pick, you run out of "Definitely want on our alliance", and how do you pick between the "Maybe..." or the "No way!"s that are left?

By then I just wouldn't really care, because it's very difficult to determine a better team from a heap full of "Maybes". Using a simpler vs. more complex scouting method is unlikely to influence the overall success of your team -- luck is more influential at that point.

Which makes me think: it's really bad game design to make a game rely on sheer luck. If good teams cannot consistently win over worse teams in the competition, it's a broken competition.

Even though poker's core game is luck-based, there's still a lot of strategy around a poker tournament -- where better players can consistently win over lesser players.

FIRST has a lot of goals with the competition -- and evaluating the most "talented team" at playing the game is the point. Inspiring students to learn more about science and technology is -- and they do a great job at it.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Oh 1114 or 148? Anybody listening? I seem to recall JVN was the one that originally linked me to that Dart commercial, making a comment on how much it paralleled the 148 method...

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

I'm with you on this one.

We spend more time preparing for a tournament than the actual time spent at a tournament. The nights of tournaments aren't spent on free time, but instead on preparing for the next day.
Or maybe its because coming from Hawaii, we have to cover all our bases, such as down to the extra zip tie for crates after TSA checks them.:)
There are teams that I admire in FIRST when we attend events as we see how prepared they are. You can tell by their demeanor as they are the most calm and relaxed, yet ready for action.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

It all comes down to how you collect your data and how it’s organized. Over the past three years we have tweaked with a scouting system and I my opinion it was a major reason that we won the Buckeye regional in 2011. Our second pick had a compatible mini-bot deployment which allowed us to win the regional by winning the mini-bot race.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

This is especially untrue at championships. While many of the powerhouse teams have relatively equal robots, the 3rd robot makes all the difference. Even at regionals a third robot can make much of the difference between winning and losing.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

It's not even true pre-Championships, but the density of teams who realize it is lower.

The basic fallacy is that there's a single spectrum on which all teams should be ranked. Definitely/maybe/no way aren't bad classifications (higher resolution can be useful), but assigning them on a single-spectrum basis ignores the basic premise of elimination matches. I'll keep it basic, but what if you ended up with 3 shooters or 3 full-sized long bots? You can afford someone with a poorer autonomous if they can feed or you have the fastest guy to the bridge. You could skimp on the third 2011 minibot if necessary to nail an awesome feeder/defender or scorer. Do you need a low standard deviation feeder? A highly adaptable strategy-filler? Do you have triple balance compatibility (2012)? If there won't be reliable autonomous modes left on the second round, can you snag a double-tuber first (2011)? [This goes back through the years]

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

The key to scouting is to not pick the two best robots left, but the ones left that complement your team's abilities the best. You can scout out the 5 best starting pitchers in baseball, but not even the Yankees can afford to buy all of them and have money left for position players that can best complement the rotation.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Scouting isn't just important in Alliance selections; when your looking for the best robot to fit into your alliance, and not necessarily the best overall robot, but also in Match play.

Teams that do not scout will be going into matches blind, with no idea of what to do. Those who have collected data on robots can say, "Robot A is a really good shooter, we need to play defense on them; hey alliance partner B, since our data says your not the very best shooter would you mind playing defense on Robot A for us?"

Now for luck. Personally I believe that luck has very little to do with FRC. I've heard 5-6 teams say after a match, "Team A won because they got lucky." Unless there was a penalty that should of been called and it wasn't; then Team A used something called "Strategy". Strategy is this little thing that weaker teams use to beat stronger teams; and it isn't "Luck"

As for Quals; Teams can get lucky 2 or 3 matches and have some really good match ups; But I've never seen a bad robot be in the Top 8 after 12 matches. They may not be the best scorer, but they might be a great defensive robot.

Everything boils down to this:
FRC is 1% Luck; 40% skill and 90% Strategy.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

I completely agree with you. Scouting and strategy are my passion. That's all I do at competitions. However I think you meant FRC is 0.76% Luck, 30.53% Skill and 68.71% Strategy.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

I agree 100%. While I'm sure this isn't true for everybody, I've always found that the majority of scouting data never really gets used to make a decision.

• Robot's technical ability to complete each of the subtasks of autonomous, scoring, defending, and endgame from 0 to 10, judged to a certain extent on Thursday to be revised later
• Overall performance from 0 to 10 from each of the 10 matches

Each of the subtasks will be weighted by importance to the game (30% for endgame, 40% scoring, etc.) and then averaged together, giving a single technical average to deal with.

The each of a team's performances from their10 matches are averaged together with the first 4 matches weighted 5%, second 2 matches weighted 10%, and the last four matches weighted 15%. This gives a single performance average to deal with.

It's very simple math, it's not much data to go through, and it can be easily done in Excel with no special scouting software. And once we've finished, it's very easy to sort, filter, and manipulate to get a good list of teams. It's perfect for smaller teams since it only takes 2-3 scouts to come up with a single performance score for each robot, and maybe a few comments to change their tech score and note their predominant strategies. And they can spend their time watching the match instead of writing.

It's not fancy, perhaps not Nate Silver levels of accuracy, but it's fast and can narrow a field of 40-80 teams down to only 10 or 15 almost instantly (with little information backlog), meaning that you can then focus your time and efforts on those teams when you start going around the pits to make connections.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

If your final score for each team is based on its overall performance, however, this data isn't particularly useful in discerning the strengths of different teams and how they fit into an alliance.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Well, my overall point was that you can figure out the overall strength directly after the seeding matches end, and then spend the next 2 hours working out which robots of those are most compatible with your own and making connections with those teams. It's primarily a way of focusing your effort, not doing everything for you.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Got it. That makes sense. You want to be choosing a robot that fits your alliance needs from a subset that has been determined to be good.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

While this method is an easy way to reduce the number of teams that you have to focus your scouting, you may have screened out a team that may be very beneficial to your alliance. One number cannot tell you how to find a robot that has some special attributes that you need.
That's why we collect all the data that we need. We don't scout just to keep people occupied. We use every piece of information we gathered. If there is anything we didn't use, we remove it from the scouting sheet at the next event.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

I tend to feel like that's something that's noticed in-person though, or in a specific note taken during, but not really gleaned from the statistics. If one of our scouts noticed that X team had something special that would really fit well with our team then there's no reason why we can't take note of that.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

This season we are doing the same thing the Ed Law does; as in having 6 students scout each match for quantitative data; and we are also having two students scout each match for qualitative data; giving us the best of both worlds. This setup does require 8 students at any given time, but it is by far the best system I've seen so far.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

This is a scouting related question that somewhat relates to this thread: What are successful ways to motivate students to do a quality job scouting (both quantitatively and qualitatively) when they do not think their work will be used in the alliance selection process?

My answer would be: quality scouting data is essential for developing the strategy for any and every match, not just eliminations. Also, even if you are not ranked #1-8, but are within a few places of that, the possibility of getting bumped up as the top teams consolidate, and then needing to choose an alliance, is very real. In addition, when attending multiple regionals with a lot of the same teams participating, having quality data on a lot of the teams ahead of time has huge benefits.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

We always did best when we took the emphasis off of winning the competition. The less pressure that is on the team, the better they tend to perform as a whole.

One thing to remember is that the bulk of FIRST competitions are not about the robot's performance, it has a more human touch to it.

Develop your team, get excited, have fun, and the ideas, innovation, and even the execution will flow much better. In short, take the pressure off.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

Let them be fans of the game, not just their own team. My College and Pro football teams are having (had) bad years. Making penny bets with family members or creating fantasy leagues helps keep the interest up. It can work with scouting groups too.

Challenge them to make a pick-list and give bragging rights to the scout who picks the closest to the actual draft.

Once the picking is done have each scout predict the elimination bracket including number of games per match and score (Similar to an NCAA bracket) Cover dinner for the winning scout.

Consider a head scout a 5th member of the drive team. Give it some prestige and have a member of the drive team come to the stands between matches to discuss their thoughts on the upcoming match.

Keep in mind that scouting can have a long-term payoff too. When my non-graduating team members tour the pit and evaluate the success of a design they are also expanding their engineering and best practices knowledge base. We encourage team members to jot down notes and take pictures of interesting robot features. I also encourage them to try to figure out how it works before asking for a tour of the robot features.

Robustness is a key attribute, and generally one or more robots will not survive the elimination rounds. A side bet on which robot will need to be replaced first can be interesting. Rooting for a robot to break is in poor taste, but while looking for candidates you are inadvertently making a list of teams that you might be able to offer mechanical assistance to.

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

You watch the scouting section of Karthik's presentation.

We're also considering running an internal Fantasy FIRST League: draft your own teams, become the all-around expert on them (prior events, pit scouting and match data).

Re: How to Win a Robotics Competition
 

When students see that the data they collect are used in every match we are in and how it helped us make better decision, they will try their best to collect accurate data. Another factor that works for our team is since I am the coach and I am intimately involved in scouting data, the students will never turn in a blank piece of paper.

This year we are moving to tablets (discussed in another thread). It makes it easier to add other fun things. As part of the data collection, the students will predict the alliance selection order. We have not decided what the reward is yet for the winner. I will let the team decide.