generic strategy, what works best?
 

sorry the title sounds a little vague... i couldn't think of anything better

Anyhow, when going into any game, what strategy does your team employ?

for instance, my team (868), goes into the game with the question "What can we do to make ourselves an attractive alliance partner; What is the one thing that we can do better than anyone else"

This has led to several awards/victories for our strategy, in Stack Attack we won the GM Industrial Design award for being able to stack 7 crates high; in Raising the Bar we only went for the bar, and could roll across it, so we were picked for the Einstein runner up alliance; in Triple Play we could stack 4/5 tetras at a time, getting us picked for the winning alliance at IRI; where last year we won the Xerox Creativity Award for our drivetrain, and what we wanted to do with it.

Do any other teams follow a similar strategy (if so, hows it working for you?) if not, what is it?

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

from an engineering perspective there is no generic strategy that will take you from one year to the next.

Each year the game is different. The way you score points is different, the way you play defense, the importance of auton mode, alliance pairing...

The only thing that is consistant in engineering is change.

On the teams I have mentored the first thing we did after the kickoff was to analyse all the scoring possibilities. What is the max possible score? What is the best reasonable score if you focus on one method or another.

Once you have that figured out you can reasonably assume that some team will be able to make a robot that can approach the high (reasonable) score. You then have to assess your teams resources and abilities, to see where your team fits best into the picture.

Its a difficult decision process, maybe the most difficult part of FIRST, deciding what functions you want your robot to perform. If you try to do everything, then your robot will not do any one thing very well.

If you try to do only one thing, and do it better than everyone else, it might not be enough to win matches. Then unless you are allied with complementary robots you wont rank very high.

The bottom line for us was always this: we chose two or three main functions we wanted our robot to perform, then we judged our success on how well the robot did those things. You cant design a robot to win - you cant design a [WIN] button into the control panel. There is a lot of luck and chance involved, so all you can really do is match your robot design to the capabilites of your team (this year).

Next year things might be completely different for your team.

I should add, I was on moderately sized teams, 20 to 30 students with 4 or 6 excellent core engineer mentors. Two or three main functions worked well for our team size, to keep everyone busy and challenged with their subsystem, without causing the team to be overwhelmed.

Larger teams can do more, smaller teams might only choose one or two main functions.

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

Oh man, what a topic with an endless number of answers.

Teamwork, individual success... oh man I've got homework, I'll come back to this thread later :D

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

Generally I think we go in thinking about how to break-down the game and find the best way of winning. We might do what most teams do or we might do something very different with our robot.

In First Frenzy - Rising the Bar, we also only went for the bar. We were thinking that with 25pts locked up, the other teams would at least need 5 balls to get the same result and catch us.

This year we were a high goal shooter, thinking that the best way to win was to score a lot of points. Especially with the higher goal being worth more.

This is just my opinion, but I think we usually go for the most points that we can get. Because you can't always count on getting a good match list at the regionals, and you will know the average points you will get.

As for how its worked for us, I think its a good system for us. In the years that I've been apart of the team, we've have been getting our robot done sooner and it has done better. Mostly because the extra time for debugging.

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

The best strategy IMHO is to scare the pants off of people. Look at 25 this year..

The robot was very good. Was it the best ever? No. Did it have weaknesses? Yes.

But, people were so focused on playing defense on them they forgot to score (oops) and 25 went undefeated through 2 regionals.

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

Since I've joined my team always focuses on unique and different designs. I can remember constant remarks this year and the last about the uniqueness of both robots.

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

1) Take final score from FIRST's game introduction video at kickoff

2) Divide that score by the "FIRST universal optimism factor"

3) You now have the number of points an alliance needs to score in order to win 90% of the matches in a season

4) Take score from 3 and divide by 2

5) You now know how many points your robot needs to score in a match

6) Determine the simplest, highest success rate strategy to get that score

7) Don't worry about strategies that yield more or less points than your target

8) Build your robot, so that it can score that many points, every single match... no matter what

9) See you in Atlanta!

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

Any word on what that factor has been historically?

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

It was 50 points, not 25. ;) (Although 5 balls and a doubler=50 pts, so that may have been what you were thinking)


Scoring can be broken down along these lines pretty much every year (2006 example in paranthesis)

Primary Scoring (Center Goal)
Secondary Scoring (Corner Goal)
Auxiliary Scoring (Auto bonus points)-Doubler Balls, Bonus Points, Etc.
Positioning Points (Ramp bonus)

Each team has to individually assess which of these oppurtunities they want to pursue, which compliment eachother, and which can win independent of eachother.

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

1. What can your drivers/machine accomplish on a regular and consistent basis IN competition (not what happens in the perfect world of practice at home)?

After listing honest answers to 1:

2. Which one/ones from the list best compliment the strengths of your upcoming alliance partners?

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

The generic engineering strategy that takes us from one season to the next is KISS! I'm not talking about the slogan, but actually striving for elegant simplicity. We always try to break the game down to basics. That is, we ask ourselves; what is worth doing, and what is the most straightforward way to get it done?

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

I think Jack has the answer. Kiss is our teams base engineering principle. Because of budget constraint we also employ the KIC (keep it cheap) principle. So for the last couple years we've been kissing and kicing the robot. Have had fair success with those base principles. Like Jack said, there is a certain elegance in simplicity.

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

Einstein said "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler".

KISS is in line with this, but dont take it too far. Some engineering concepts and esp control systems are complex, but the improvements they can provide are well worth the added complexity.

Closed looped feedback on steering or motion control is a good example. With a yaw rate sensor and a simple PID control loop, you can make a robot steering both highly precise, and highly responsive, compared to feeding the joystick commands directly to the motors.

Simplicity of design gets you some very important characteristics: reliability, repairability, easy to fabricate and assemble, low cost, quick 'time to market'

but simplicity must be balanced against performance, precision, accuracy, and ease of use and driver control.

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

A wiseguy man once told me at two in the morning in the middle of a suburban street that you've only really got to do two things to have a better chance of doing well:

1) Drive reliably.
2) Perform your main objective.

The first part is easy now; thanks to the work of Paul Copioli, JVN, and Andy Baker, you have a pretty big safety net when it comes to drive. Sure, you can still toy with a custom design, but there's always the kitbot as a safety.

The latter part can be trickier, but it's usually a bit better if you've got some fallbacks here as well. Take 1251, for example. They were waaaaaaay overweight with their shooting robot, so they lopped off their shooter, changed up some of their robot, and made their objective to be a door-dropping, human-load dumper. And really, it was pretty effective on the field. (Perhaps I shouldn't be describing one-third of the Palmetto Regional champions as "pretty effective".) Same story with 1902 this year--they had a shooter planned, but it would only be half-baked by ship day, so they opted to power balls into the corner goal. Nothing particularly fancy, but their ability to do it well sure got them a lot of work on Saturday afternoons.

(No, I'm not kidding about that first part.)

Re: generic strategy, what works best?
 

Was it two? I could have sworn it was more like three. =-]

If you have a reliable drivetrain, you're immediately better than some teams at the competitions. You guaruntee that you'll be able to get from point A to point B whenever neccessary. You always give yourself a chance. Without a reliable drivetrain, you have no chance.

I believe my exact words were "primary function." However, you get a B+ for getting the concept right. ;-]

There's nothing more demoralizing for your team or unattractive to potential alliance partners than not being able to do what you promise. It doesn't matter what your primary function is (shoot balls, cap a tetra, hang from the bar), if you can actually do it consistantly you will, again, be better than some teams.

These two ideas combined will likely put you into the top 50% of robots in any competition. If you don't qualify top 8, you'll probably be picked as a partner. From there, a little luck and planning should net you a regional championship every few years.

No, he isn't. ;-]