Tips to make your team a contender?
 

So the team I've been a part of has been around since Rebound Rumble, and in our last two years we've had some small tastes of glory. We've consistently been able to get into the semi-finals at the district events, but we keep falling just short of making the finals. We also haven't ranked very consistently high in the qualification matches, and we've been all the way up to 7th at one point in a competition and then fell back down to around 18th. We don't have a huge budget or a huge team, but we really want to make it over the hump and go for a championship run next year. It seems that the most successful teams are quite active in the offseason, so I figured now would be a good time to make a thread about this. Are there any teams on here who have had success and could provide some tips on taking the next step to break past the semi-finals? Both offseason and build season tips would be great. How does your design process go? I've always been fascinated by how the top ranked teams are always able to figure out the optimal strategy and build their robot to perform it without having played any real matches yet. Like how the top teams this year seemed to all have in-place stackers at the feeder station and some could even make multiple 6 stacks in a match.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I have a few key things I belive from my time in FIRST that has helped me and my team.

1. Mentors...you need to find mentors who are passionate about mentoring the kids. Not only to help them with engineering, design process, but is upbeat an knowledgeable about their field. I've found the best mentors are often former students who have started their careers. They knew what it was like and how it will be. The mentors also need to be a consistent influence on the students. Flaky mentors are the worst

2. Your goal in this particular situatuion is to make it through the finals with the robot right? Then im goign to say something that i will likely get railed on about....Play to win. Recently e eryone talks about it not being about the robot or its more than the robot...and i agree to a certain point. But winning is nice...it feels nice...and this is a competition. So, design to win. Did your design not work the way you thought after the 1st time?...well then iterate it. Iterate and use your 25lb withholding to your advantage. Take large risks at competition. Make bold design changes to improve yourself. Often I am conflicted with keeping the robot the same and doing okay or taking a chance with a bold improvised change to make sure we seed high, but in the end of the day we are here to win this thing. Sometimes bold changes come back to haunt us...but the world isn't changed by people playing it safe. Nobody is perfect and neither is any robot. So we always strive to improve the robot.

3. 2 Robots. It is without a doubt a game changer when your drivers can practice with the robot at home anytime they want. Also gives you a identical platform to test any modifications before doing them at competition. The other advantage with a second identical bot is the ability for your drivers to compinsate for a robot that may not be as refined. Good drivers with a ok bot will end up on top vs the best robot in the world with bad drivers. Plus, you can do a little competition with identical robots in the off season for some fun.

4. 2 events before champs. You learn so much at your first event that it is a shame when teams do not get the opportunity to act on and apply what they learned. Going to 2 events is a huge undertaking both financially and time, but it is so worth it to learn, apply, and see the fruit of that directly instead of waiting until next year. This goes for both the robot, team stuff, and business.

Sorry if what I am typing seems a little scattered, but im sitting here in a meeting being bored and multitasking ::safety::

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I came here to link Karthik's Effective FIRST Strategies conferences, since it's what our team has used to help evolve ourselves from season to season (I hope his from this year is archived, because it was excellent. WOOF!), but this is the biggest piece of your question that stood out to me.

You'll see this in this presentation, but recognize your limits and work within them. Example: 1923 doesn't have a lot in the way of manufacturing. Nothin' fancy. I've got a bandsaw and a drill press. We have to do pretty much everything COTS. Alright then! Let's roll with that, and do the best we can with what we have. (VersaFrame has helped us immensely this year.)

Here's the Chief post promoting his conference from this Championship - it has links to all of the earlier versions as well. Highly recommend. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...89&postcount=1

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Work hard. Then work even harder.

Work until there is nothing left to work on, then work more.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I second this statement. The problem that we have is trying to work within our means. Most years I'm scared that we will make it to worlds as I'm not sure we could pull together the funds to go. We don't have the funds for a second regional and definitely don't have enough for a second robot. It was great this year to have the old CRIO around just to have something to practice driving. I would love to see somebody give the best tips for teams that are trying to do the best they can with limited resources.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

If you can, build a replica of your robot and practice with it a lot. This helps in a few ways - you can identify what might go wrong, which parts might break first under heavy usage and be prepared to fix them, and you can also improve your performance on the field significantly.

You could have the best engineered robot in the world, but it doesn't mean much if you struggle to drive it efficiently and effectively. But if you know how to drive your robot in your sleep, you are likely to see success. Many of the top-performing teams have logged hundreds of hours in driver practice.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Sit down with all of the important stakeholders and make two lists. In one, put everything that went right this year. In the other, put down everything that either didn't work or needs to be improved.

Pick 5 things from each list. For the list of things that went right, mark down what you can do to duplicate it next year. For things that went wrong, mark down at least one thing you can do to fix it or at least improve it going forward.

Do this every year and you'll be surprised where you are in a few years.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

If you have trouble building the best robot, make sure your drive team can compensate. Being the driver on a team that fortunately for me has pumped out three awesome robots over my years I may not be speaking from first hand experience, but your drivers need to know how exploit the features of your robot and get the absolute most out of it. We won our 2014 regional with a team as our second pick that not only had scissor lift as their shooter but that we left to the back court alone because we trusted their drive team enough to get it done(and good god did they get it done).

After matches if your drive team tells you something broke, and you didn't really know because your robot was still doing "fine", you have the correct drive team.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

You don't have to make two full robots to get practice. This year my team decided at the last minute that we really needed practice and debugging time, so we built a second identical chassis to practice on. We just mounted our with holding allowance on it. The key here is to maximize the usage of unmodified cots parts in your with holding allowance as they don't count towards the weight. Hopefully, next year we don't have to take this short cut, but it definitely made us much more competitive.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Good start!

Work smarter as well as harder. Don't spend four hours building a system when fifteen minutes of number crunching might clue you in that it won't work. And don't spend four hours of number crunching when fifteen minutes of shop and practice time will give you an empirical answer. The smartest work is done when you know your team's capabilities well enough to quickly figure out the quickest way to do something.

Practice, practice, practice. This will make your work both better and faster.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

We've found that while a second robot would be nice, we could do without by making a timeline for build season involving finishing the robot early, and then working hard to achieve that goal. It may not always be possible, but having a working robot done early is great to debug, revise, and practice driving.

With our early-completed robot, we went to practice events during Weeks 5 and 6 of build. Bring able to practice on full and half fields for ~10 hours before bag and tag went a long way. We also taped down field positionings on our build space floor, cleared some space, and the drivers practiced basic maneuvers during the end of build and during out-of-bag time. At our events, we make it a huge priority to get inspected quickly and onto the practice field as much as possible.

You don't need a second robot to train good drivers. You just need to be smart with your Build Season and out-of-bag time. Practice really goes a long way.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

This has been our strategy over the last two years:
- Have clear top leadership (oligarchy or one person in charge, whether student or mentor) that isn't afraid to make critical decisions
- Have a strong working history of FIRST and insight as to the reasons why the top teams won and which mechanisms are good in which situations
- Recruit talented and motivated people through whatever connections possible
- Do your best to pad your robot budget in the off-season so you have enough money to 'break' things and not worry about the monetary cost of a mid-build season design or strategy change
- (if your strategy requires lots of movement) build a practice robot. If you don't have the budget for a practice robot, make sure your strategy has high scoring and low movement.
- Build as much of the field as is required for your strategy
- Understand that things are going to break and nothing will be right the first time
- Always practice under field conditions (if you are a feeder station robot, run feeder station drills)
- Use COTS over fabricated items wherever possible
- Focus on acquiring and handling the game piece (i.e. how will this object sit in my mechanism so it is consistent enough every time?)
- Work copious amounts of hours to make sure the robot is always getting incrementally better. Time is the most finite resource in this game, and your most unrestricted time is from kickoff to bag day.
- Have a clear understanding of which elements of your robot are 'good enough to win' or 'not good enough to win' at any given time, so you can prioritize which elements of your robot currently need the most upgrades/attention. What is 'good enough' is different between districts, regionals, region championships, and world championships.
- Don't work on things that don't work toward whatever your end goal is unless you have an excess of resources. Focus on the items that will most improve your win equity
- Don't feel locked into your strategy, and carefully observe how the game evolves across the competition season to improve your own performance.

As we grow, our strategy is moving more toward distributed leadership, more fabricated components, and having more resources to work toward side goals besides winning competitions.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

These two are very high on the list, particularly practicing under field conditions. There are never lines of totes to pick up on the field and there is never a human on the field to nudge game pieces around. Make it HARD for the driver! Do not make it easy for them.

That second point is why our robots have had rolly-grabbers on all our intakes since 2009. They JUST WORK!!! If your robot isn't sucking it's not handling the game piece fast enough.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I can't remember if I heard the advice from EWCP or Karthik's talk (or both) but in general you want to extend the season as much as possible. Plan for a 12 week season (build and competition), not a 6 week one. Having a second robot helps facilitate that.

While we're not a "contender" yet, it's made a significant difference to our competition performance. There's no silver bullet of course.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

We're fortunate to be within an hour drive of Bayou regional, so we haven't had major travel expenses for our first four regular seasons. We've never before had enough for entry fee to for a second regional, much less travel. This is the first year we were able to build a second robot (helped by a BOM that came to about $1500). We ranked #42 at Bayou, but got picked 23rd for some of our distinctive abilities (some of which were developed after bag and tag) and wound up going to CMP. We knew that our school board would pay the $5k for our entry fee, but that left about $15k for travel, meals, and incidentals. It would normally have taken us about six months to raise that much! We hit the streets and the internet and raised it in about three weeks. We offered a trip to the junior varsity member (later expended to two when a varsity member couldn't make it) to the biggest fund raiser of the JV. Two of our JV members each raised more than $1000 in those three weeks (one of them was inside the Oscar the Grouch costume at the mascot dance before Einstein). We actually shot a good bit over our basic fund raising goals, and (with our new sponsors) we're seriously considering a second regional in 2016.

We came back from CMP with great ideas for our design and build process, some info on how to get FRC recognized (and at least partially funded) by the school system, and a bit of homework from the Kamen himself to spread the inspiration faster and farther than ever before.

So, it sounds kind of backwards, but we're using our trip to CMP as a launch pad to the next levels of competition, fundraising, outreach and most of all, inspiration. It makes you wonder if having multiple CMPs isn't an entirely bad thing.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Wow, there's a lot of good tips in here. Thanks for the advice so far everyone!

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The most important things i have seen here is the building of a second bot for practice and and planing with a strategy to win. not that you should step on other teams to win or anything like that, still be gracious and professional, but if the drive and desire is int there it wont happen. Again building 2 bots is critical. drive team practice is absolutely critical. We were able to have lots of drive practice this year and it really paid off.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

This is a great thread, and I'm going to save it as a resource to look back on next season. Lots of great tips, and as I look back, lots of lessons learned that I can identify with.

We ran late with our build and had to bag an incomplete robot. We also had to drastically simplify the design that we had originally planned due to lack of time. At our first regional, we spent the entire first day finishing it, and we missed all of our scheduled practice matches. Then we had qualification matches the following day with NO driver practice. The results were predictable. We ranked very low, and we experienced the exact opposite of the quoted post -- from the stands, we kept asking "what is he doing? why is he ___? why doesn't he ___?" and we didn't realize that the reason for the erratic driving was because a mechanism had failed.

Luckily we had a second regional and then got chosen from the wait list to go to CMP, two experiences which helped get our rears into gear. We fixed a lot of our problems -- and actually had driver practice! -- in time for the second regional, and that helped us double our average match score. That boosted everyone's confidence, but we still noticed multiple failures of our tote-holding mechanism. Learning we were going to championships was one more motivator to fix that problem for good and have even more drive practice.

At champs, it was like we were a whole other robot. Because we were! We had evolved from a landfill robot that couldn't do cans to a feeder station robot that could. Once our driver got to know the robot he could do much more skilled things with it. At one of our matches on Curie our tote-holder failed again, meaning we couldn't stack, but he quickly made the best of it and started scoring totes by pushing them onto the platform one at a time. We almost didn't notice ;)

So, to reiterate other points -- driver practice is huge.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

1) have an identical (or mostly identical) practice bot. My team has made a second robot since 2013, and the last 3 years have been our most successful ever.
2) good mentors, across the board. Have a diverse group of dedicated mentors for all technical skills, and multiple good mentors for outreach/business. Their many unique ideas will help your students gain a wider perspective on FIRST as a whole. This year, my team lost two of our leading mentors from the last few years, but we were able to fill the gap with multiple new, dedicated mentors. Their new, refreshing ideas and skills helped propel us to our best season ever. Our old mentors have left an amazing legacy, and our new mentors have done an excellent job pushing our success even further.
3) sponsors, sponsors, sponsors!!! Don't just look for money, find sponsors who will provide you with mentors and special machining capabilities you couldn't have otherwise. One of our leading sponsors, Industrial Kinetics, does all our welding. Also, just because you have one sponsor contributing $10k+ doesn't mean you can't find more sponsors willing to pitch in that much.
4) start other FIRST teams. FLL/FTC students come in with a better-than-average understanding of STEM and FIRST values.
5) communicate and collaborate with local teams. My team is blessed to be surrounded by excellent teams (special shoutout to 1625, 2451, 4655 and 111). We all bring our practice robots together to practice and get new ideas.
6) karthik's "don't make something beyond your means" paradigm is very true, but you MUST remember to push yourself. My team could have stopped at our collector, elevator, and can holder, but we pushed ourselves to make a pair of can pullers that could fit in the tiny amount of space remaining in our robot. It worked, and they were vital in making us competitive at the world level.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I second this!! My team scheduled out to finish our robot 2 weeks before bag and tag. We also had access to a full size practice field because our team and 4778 were hosting a Week Zero event. With all of this extra practice we were able to work out all the bugs early and not scramble to fix our robot at regionals.

In addition to having mentors it is also very important to have sponsors and community support. When your team makes it to worlds and you don't have the funds, your community will come together to help you raise the money. At least this is my experience. Having sponsors and raising money to go to Worlds BEFORE you qualify is nice too. If it is pre-budgeted then you don't have to worry about it. If you end up not qualifying you can save the money for next year.

I would also recommend that you and your team are on the same page. Like the majority of the people here have said, it takes WORK! Not the work of one person, but the work of your team. You don't need a huge team, but the people you do have need to realize how much work it will take and be willing to do what it takes. I guess the bottom line is you can't do it alone. You need your teammates, your community, your mentors, and your sponsors' support.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

how to get better= spend more time on FRC

more time in the off-season
more time in the build season
more time at events
more time

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The thing about being a contender is that there's really a variety of things you can do to do this. also since you're a local team I'm gonna try to use mostly PNW teams as examples

Outreach: if you want to be a Chairmans' or Engineering Inspiration team, Do lots and lots of this: 1540, Flaming Chickens always makes relatively good robots, but are really known for their outreach programs. 2980 also does a lot of this stuff.
Outreach can be hard if you're a small team or have limited money resources, so allocate well; holding robotics camps and volunteering in your community and at as many FIRST events as possible are great ways to do good things while looking good for an award.

Cool Engineering stuffs: if you can make nice CAD designs, or build a beautiful robot, it can really help you be competitive. my team, 2046, was average this year, but our awesome powder coating and our design won us 2 awards at district events, helping us to qualify for St. Louis (just barely, but whatever).

The robot: Building towards the game is a great way to be a contender. this was a year of letting lesser known teams really shine, since specialization was encouraged in finals. you could make a simple but effective robot that accomplishes the game task (like 3663, 1318, 2550, etc. from this year), or specializes (like 900, 1425, 1987, that one robot that just canburgled and dealt with noodles). in games that have defense, it becomes even easier to do well if you build a strong drivetrain, have good drivers, and can do at least OK the other parts of the game. 4060 in 2014 was the most terrifying defensive robot, able to shut down even the best of teams. my team that year had one of the fastest and strongest drivetrains, and learned very quickly that ramming into robots that didnt hold the ball very steadily was a great defensive strategy.

In the end, it's easiest to do well with a simply designed robot that is built to do what it's supposed to do. 4488 had one of the simplest robots around- it was a lift and a little claw thingie for containers- they didnt even have a collector! 4488 was also really simple in 2014; a collector and a catapult with a fast drive. 1425 in 2013 was the best feeder station robot in the world (or near so), and they just had a shooter and a little climber thing.

I just wrote a lot, I hope I didnt get off topic

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Mentors.

FRC is a game of mentors.

Just about all of the fabulous ideas in this thread come down to this one thing.

Build and diversify the mentor base, and everything else can follow.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I'd say FRC is game of People (mentors and students) and Money.
You need all 3 Mentors, Students and Money. Take any of those parts out and there will be no FRC team.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The minute you get a functioning mechanism start working on a better one. We must have went through three, maybe even four intake styles this season. Good is never good enough.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

When it comes to deciding a strategy that you want your robot to follow, I do something with my FTC kids that I call point analysis.

First, I give my kids a detailed quiz on scoring. It tests them on every single way to score points, and how many points each scoring way is worth. I do this for two reasons: save the results for driver selections, and to figure out the max points you can score.

Once you figure out the max score, you can figure out where most of the points come from. You can compare different parts of the challenge to see which would be a better option. For example, if we were to apply this to 2013, it appears that the frisbees get you the most points. You could compare that to climbing the pyramid to see which is better. 4 frisbees at once and 3 pts per high goal is a 12 point cycle. Compare that to a climb and dump of 50pts. It would take 5 cycles, or 17 frisbees to score more than the pyramid. Ask yourself if you think that is possible, and then go for that.

We first did point analysis for Block Party, and we ended up finalists at Michigan States and a spot to a super regional.

Point analysis isn't perfect, but a very good starting point to lead you to victory.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

There are many great suggestions here. This should be a "classic" thread that we steer rookie and young teams to each year. In fact, if someone could compile this into a white paper we could post it here and also get FIRST to post it as a resource on their website.

I'll describe what I think has led to our success over the last 4 years. Until this year, our "shop" was a shipping container in the field behind Steve Harvey's math classroom. We had a bandsaw and table saw, and last year we got an old Bridgeport mill. I think many other teams are in similar situations so I don't believe that resources need be a limiting factor to achieving significant success. Within these constraints, here's what lifted us since 2012:

- Fundraising and sponsorship: Our team budget increased from $35k in 2012 to $125k this year. We had to get the money from somewhere. Fortunately we were able to get initial seed money from UC Davis, and we've used that to leverage into other sponsors. In a small community like Snohomish you can get to know every business personally--start with your Chamber of Commerce and the city's economic development office. You also can reach out to large companies in Everett like Boeing. Teams in large cities can contact the large corporations with HQs there. Sell the "program" not just the team aspect. We're not the local baseball club; we're an integrated project-based education program that uses a sports-model to inspire students. To achieve this you need non-technical students to lead this effort. Bring in students who are interested in business, media, presentations, even the arts. You can make your team a bigger community.
- Outreach: We have developed projects outreach both to our community and other FRC teams. Somehow that has provided a catalyst of dedication of our team members. I think it makes the students realize that they are part of bigger effort. I don't think it's coincidence that most of the Hall of Fame teams are also competitive powerhouses. Again, you can involve students who are interested in more than engineering. Education, arts, media are all needed for this.
- Constant improvement: If you look at pictures of our 2013 bot at CVR vs champs you wouldn't believe that it's the same machine. We constantly work on improvements throughout the season. Until this year 1671 would build a machine that very good at their first regional but it would be static and other teams would pass them by. This year they were constantly making improvements. They weren't particularly close to us at CVR but they outscored us as Sacramento and then took a riskier pick with a higher upside to go for the win. Taking risks is part of the constant improvement mindset.
- Strategic analysis: Karthik's talk at Champs covered most of this. Think before building. Game out all of the possibilities. Be willing to go down potential dead ends and cast aside your failures. We have developed a braintrust led by our mentor Mike Corsetto. You can't duplicate Mike but you can get most of the way there by duplicating the process. We make a list of what we would want to achieve and then slim it down to what is really achievable. For example we dropped landfill loading because we realized it was a tradeoff and that we couldn't do all types of loading plus a fast cangrabber. Last year we decided that being the top finishing shooter was less important in our overall strategy.
- Scouting: we start developing our system even before build season. We push data via smartphones to our drive team. We've integrated our pit scouting into our electronic system so that we can see that data in the pits before we develop our pick list. We game out potential draft scenarios. (We knew what was coming in 2013 on Curie and if the other teams had been able to see it as well they may have made different decisions.) Our scouting system was critical to identifying 840 and 295 at CVR in 2013; we did not have the best robot at that competition (3970 did.) A side benefit is that you use your excess programmers to develop and maintain your scouting system. There's really only so much programming needed for the robot. Plus you can bring students who are interest in statistics and "Moneybot". Karthik said this is how he got involved with robotics.

We will post videos from our fall workshop that address some of these topics, and will have another workshop in October in Davis.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Some really good suggestions here. I'm taking notes.

The practice robot thing was one of the biggest takeaways I had from last year, and it served us really well this year to have one. *But* if I can rant a bit, the fact that you need one to be competitive is quite frankly unfair.

FIRST set the bag rules (and crate rules previously) to put some kind of cap on the labour teams sunk into their bots. This is good for the sanity of the mentors, and was a noble attempt at leveling the playing field. Unfortunately it back fired on both counts. Now *all* successful teams build two robots so they can continue practicing and developing into the competition season. That puts a doubly high cost barrier between rookie and poorer teams and ever being competitive. Everyone knows this is unfair (not to mention a complete waste of resources), but the image of "stop build day" is so compelling that no one is willing to acknowledge the problem.

As far as I'm concerned, we should stop the expensive farce and get rid of the bag rules. Changing the marketing literature build a robot in 7 weeks, or 8 weeks or 10 weeks is just as impressive as 6. End of rant and derail :p

edit:
We did the same, and that's good advice. We were lucky to have old drive base parts donated to us by 4039 and 2056 for the job and it certainly saved us money to withhold our elevator for the practice bot. The rest of our mechanisms weighed more than 30 lb so we still had to (pointlessly in the big picture) build a lot of stuff twice.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

This and some more of this. Before you even start thinking of designs, read ALL the rules with the entire team, and then decide on your strategy based off the game and scoring methods. For example, this year your priority list for scoring may have looked something like this.
Once you set your strategy, you can start looking at designs on how to accomplish it. The important thing is making sure something low on your list doesn't trump something high on your list. For example using the list above, your ability to load from the HP should never jeopardize your ability to cap with an RC.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Get as many people on your team as possible over the 10,000 hour point.

I believe someone could do an entire paper on the rise/fall of powerhouses within FRC as related to the arrival/creation & departure of these individuals.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Personally, I feel that if a team is low-budget and lacks a large build team, building 2 robots can be extremely difficult and lead to students being burnt out.

However, I completely agree that driver practice is crucial. Drivers need to have complete control of the robot in order to maximize effectiveness on the field. Having a competition-ready robot by week 5-6 ensures that drivers have sufficient time to master the robot.

On the topic of drivers, do driver tryouts before the season starts to make sure that the designated driver(s) get as much practice as possible.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Building a practice robot is one of our team's goals. However, we haven't had the resources to build a second robot due to team size and space.

This year, three things helped us make a big improvement in our team. (Our first year to qualify for PNW District Championships and the World Championships)
1. We upped our outreach program (by several magnitudes)
2. We sought out advice from upper level teams, 1983 before Central Washington (helped us improve our ability to align to the feeder station and handle totes) and 4488 at Central Washington (helped to convince us that a canburglar would be more important than a ramp at PNW Champs).
3. We used our withholding allowance to continue to improve our robot. Our previous mechanical mentor could only provide us with his garage shop until the bag and tag day. Our new mechanical mentor committed time beyond six weeks.

On side note, our team really enjoyed working with your team and had fun as an alliance partner at the Glacier Peak event. We've seen the improvement of 4309 over the years.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I personally have believed this would make an excellent book. Several years ago, I read Built to Last and thought it would be wonderful for someone to do a study on FRC (or FSAE of Mini-Baja...).
While 10,000 hrs. is on the verge of doable (that is 5 years of working a full time job of 40 hrs/wk), I think that sustainability is likely more about getting a lot of members on a path to 1,000 hours. While and order of magnitude less "experience", it is not an order of magnitude of less "goodness" that the individual can offer.

A discussion on practice driving:
For those that are interested in watching the progression, grab some new students and have them drive the robot. The first 10 minutes to 1 hour are them basically figuring out the controls. After about 10 hours of active practice, the driver/operator likely get to the "good" level. Around 100 hours of active practice, your drive team should be very very good. In an FRC season, it is hard to get much past 100 hours of practice (not impossible, but very hard).
This is not much different than with video games. The first time a person plays a new type of video game that they have never played that style, their talent is the biggest contributor to initial success. Once they get around 10 hours of play time, most can do a pretty good job of handling the character and moving about the board/world/game space. Around 100 hours, the player is likely to be considered very skilled relative to outsiders, but still a long way from an expert. Around 1,000 hours, they should be incredibly proficient (though experts will still likely be considerably better).
Between that 100-1,000 hour mark, they can switch to a different game of a similar genre, and will likely start out relatively good, and have initial progress that is much more rapid.

This is much the same with CAD, design Calculations, strategic analysis, fabricating parts...

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The best thing you can do is understand the game well, and build well within your means. Strive to work smarter, not harder. Make a priority list and stick to it like the law. Have fun. Keep organised.

Do these things and the rest will come. Don't jump too far into the practice robot camp before you seriously evaluate not only your financial situation (the thing that everyone things about) but your ability to actually make that second robot during the season (the thing that few people talk about). I have seen far too many teams have "practice robots" that the team is too busy fixing/getting ready/building two robots at a time that no practicing actually gets done. Not only do they not practice, it hinders the competition robot as less time is devoted to it. Be very careful with them. That being said, if you can do it, it's a huge asset.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Play practice match 1. Build a robot that can play practice match 1. A good robot that was finished on practice day will always lose to a mediocre robot that played in practice match 1. If you can get into that match, in most cases you will be able to play at least 4-5 matches back to back without waiting on the filler line. If you do that you'll be head and shoulders above every team that was working in their pits back then. This means that you should design a robot you can bag completed. Charge your batteries before practice day. Plan hour to hour what you're going to be doing and when you're going to be inspected. Finally, don't forget to program your radio.

Note: if you can get inspected really quickly there won't be a wait to get an inspector.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Understand your resources. Know your limits, your weaknesses, your strengths, and potential opportunities in all aspects of your team. Your students, mentors, build space, sponsors, local community, finances, and your team experience are just a few aspects of your team that can impact your performance as a team. With the 2015 season still fresh in your mind sit down as a team and discuss how the year went. What did you do right? What did you do wrong? What didn't you capitalize on? What parts of your team do you see as a strength moving forward? What parts of your team do you see as a weakness? What steps can we take between now and kickoff to better prepare ourselves?

Get the robot done and practice, practice, practice and don't be afraid to iterate mechanisms to improve your performance. Constant improvement is needed to stay competitive with the game if you come out in week 1 swinging.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Our neighbor FRC team, 1912 Team Combustion, refers to these three components as their "Combustion Triangle". (Though as I recall it's sponsors rather than money, but that's a subtle distinction.)

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Thanks! You guys have been awesome the past couple years when we've been at the same events. That's awesome you got to the championship.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

While it wasn't something Karthik said directly at his Effective Strategies presentation last week, two pieces of what he said engaged in some promiscuous correlation.
Key pieces in making a high-scoring robot are:

• execute plenty of "game cycles"
• spend a lot of time building and trying things
• be ready to toss an idea when another works better

These ideas combine into the concept of "innovation cycles" - how many times during build season can you go through the various engineering cycles:

• redesign (back to the drawing board)
• major update (rebuild nearly or completely from scratch)
• minor update (rebuild a component, whether a single piece or subassembly)
• tweak (minor modification of a component)
• tune (adjustment of a component)

That is, I have to think that the speed with which you make each engineering cycle (while being sufficiently thorough, of course) increases the value of each hour spent in the design and build process.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

At the same time though, you don't want to be tweaking so much that your drive team never gets to actually, you know, drive the robot.

"Hang on guys... I just want to try adjusting this one other thing over here..."

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I note that Karthik also brought up the 10,000 hour myth in his talk on Wed. night. Several authors, including David Epstein in the "Sports Gene" show that Malcom Gladwell was incorrect in developing his anecdotal assessment about needing 10,000 hours to be successful. Experience is very helpful, but there are means of shortcutting it.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Not as subtle as you might think. Nurturing sponsors means that money arrives on a continual basis. Sponsors also can deliver much more than money, including publicity, mentors, community and other support. Never think of your sponsors as "money." Make them integral to your community.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I think the anectdote makes more sense when you think about an example like someone just practice hitting the ivories on a piano for 10000 hours alone and can become really good at it. Doing FRC for 10000 hours independent of other things can probably still make one person really good at it, but leaning on the processes of other people and getting a relevant education or listening to talks like the strategy discussion can take the hours to mastery count down a lot.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The point stands though, whether or not the quantitative metric is correct - if you want to be good at something, you need to spend a lot of time with it. Learning, practicing, improving, talking, teaching, competing. The more you do the more proficient you become.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Practice is indeed how you get to Carnegie Hall.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I don't dispute it, I was just highlighting shortcuts. There are teams in FRC that are not just powerhouses, they are incubators. A good analogy here is The Daily Show. It takes people with potential, puts them through a proven process, then catapults them to success in a future project. It's possible Stephen Colbert could have hosted the Late Show without ever working on the Daily Show, but that kind of environment is very beneficial.

I think someone on 1678 said it best that they can't replicate the great mentors on the team, but they can replicate the processes those mentors work through and educate their students on it.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Epstein's point actually was that Gladwell misinterpreted the piano proficiency data. In our case, I believe "thinking smart," which is really Karthik's message, can overcome hours of work. Yes driver practice is important, but having a talented driver with 3-D spatial awareness is even more so.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I think that's what it boils down to. You either have the talent, or if you don't, you just practice. Some people are just naturally good at things, but for those of us who aren't, best we can do is practice.

Age old quote: practice makes perfect. (For most cases, it's a bit of both, especially as practice can really bring out and refine the talent.)

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Don't think inside the box. By that I mean, don't design your robot around the robot crate height to the Champs. I know a lot of teams who did that this year, mine being one. Keep the crate size in mind, but don't prioritize it.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

That's what we did. Our robot was definitely taller than a crate could hold. The only change we made was to bolt rather than weld the lift frame to the drive frame, so we could take it apart to fit a crate. It did make Saturday night at Bayou a bit of a challenge, as we didn't want to count on getting special permission to re-bag and we hadn't drilled the holes necessary to make the robot stable in a "crate configuration" until after finals. We were one of the last teams out of the venue, but we did beat getting the field into the truck. A bunch of our students helped pack up the game elements, so the Bayou folks cut us a bit of slack - and we took home a commemorative used pool noodle and a nice length of slightly used blue carpet as well as a bit of lagniappe.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I saw a few teams with two stage lifts that avoided that problem this year, as well as some whose tops could come off (once during a competition; whoops) in order to fit in the crate.

Not thinking inside the box can work beyond just height limitations. If you're a low resource team, and you choose to follow what Ri3D teams make, or base your robot off of existing mechanisms (ie a nerf disc gun in 2013), you run the danger of not being able to replicate it. I saw many teams in 2014 with the El Toro style collectors who had more trouble than teams with scoops- some couldn't even collect with it. if you instead conceptualize your own design, prototyping if possible, then you have tested it to make sure it works. Then you consult things like Ri3D for inspiration as to how to improve your mechanisms. this year especially many teams that are usually not that great came out of nowhere with brilliant designs, things that weren't even close to what Ri3D made, even some designs I never saw closely replicated anywhere else.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

There have been a lot of folks saying great things but I really think that for most teams there are 3 keys to making competitive robots:

1. learning how to design & fab strong, light structures without having access to high end equipment (for #246 you'd be surprised of how much of our robot was made from 1/16" wall angle and 1/16" rectangular tube using only a drill press, a height gauge to scribe parts and a band saw).
   
2. leaning how to interface COTS parts to those structures (for #246, that largely meant using Versaplanetaries galore, 1/2" hex shaft + hex bearings, and chain, chain, chain & more chain -- did I mention that I like chain?)
   
3. learning how to stay within the capabilities of YOUR TEAM. It doesn't matter what Cheesy Poofs or Killer Bees or Miss Daisy can do. It only matters what YOUR team can do. Look at every game with benefit of hind sight. Without fail, you can find a simple robot that your team could have made if you had committed to that design, completed it early and gotten your coders and drive team the time they needed to get good.

Dr. Joe J.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

This is very important to remember. you don't need 17 CNC mills and mounds of carbon fiber to build a winning robot. simple is almost always better.