Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

I would highly recommend paying attention to the best of the best.
1114 has (in my opinion) the best "strategy" paper I have seen:
http://www.simbotics.org/workshops

A couple points that they re-iterate and I cannot emphasize enough:
1. Build within your teams ability. (if it is your first year, and you didn't do any pre-season prototypes, co-axial swerve drive is probably too much of a stretch).
2. Its better to be good at 1-2 things than it is too be poor at a lot of things. There were only a couple of really goood teams last year that could:
Go over the bump
Under the tunnel
Hang
Kick from all three zones
The rest of the best opted out of doing one to several of these attributes.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

build it right the first time so no troubleshooting is required
get it to the programmers two weeks ahead of competiton so the code works
make sure it will NEVER COME APART during competition

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

Brian you haven't even done a build season yet haha. (*sigh* noob :D )
and its a lot harder to get it right the first time in FRC.
It's also easier to make your robot stronger in Vex frenchie. Things we didnt have on the Vex bot like chains can be a problem as you saw at C.A.G.E. match.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

Thank you for the simbotics link I read the entire thing :D that was very helpful. Yeah i think the main problem we had this year was trying to accomplish a lot of aspects. We really should've scrapped the hanging mechanism and focused more on the kicking aspect

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

Another key aspect to designing your strategy to go along with the kind of robot you want to build is the strengths of your programmers. You can build a robot that can hang and kick from all 3 zones and traverse the bump but if you cant start from auto from any of the zones, you are S.O.L. What I'm trying to say is just know your team's abilities before-hand.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

Wow. I completely missed those presentations! Those are amazing! I sent them out to our whole team (Whether or not they will read it is another topic) :rolleyes:.

There is some great and eye-opening information in these, and I will be sure to make this a common guide during the season! Thanks for showing these to us. :)

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

If you ever get the chance to go to one of 1114's presentations, it is well worth the price of admission. They are fierce competitors, but also extremely helpful and knowledgeable about what it takes to be an Einstein level team.

Not only should your team read it, but print it out, take it to your strategy meetings, and make sure you go through the steps, and print out the golden rules and make sure you are following them before you select a design.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

we break up into small teams and then come up with various designs. Then we take the best ideas that we feel are important and try to put them together. But the main thing is to pick a strat and remain with it throughout the whole season. Once you have a strat, the rest comes along without to much trouble..

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

Thank you for all the advice guys! Anybody else reading this thread that is also seeking advice should read this: Know Thyself
Thanks to IndySam for posting this first; and of course JVN for actually writing it.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

Anybody else that has a good design process they'd be willing to post on, please do. Even if you feel like you're just reiterating what everybody has said, trust me, you're not. I know that i've learned a lot from 20 or so posts on this thread already. Hopefully this can become a great thread for all the newbies to read about and learn from.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

I think the biggest thing our team has overlooked is the importance of strategy. We get what we think are great ideas and fail to realize the importance of strategy. I see you mentioned something about strategy meetings. We have never had one, and I think its a great idea! Any advice from teams like you guys I take into huge consideration! :]

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

We spend about the first week working on Strategy and how we want to play the game, and crude prototypes to understand what is reasonable. Most MAJOR successes and failures are direct results from this week.
*Our team relies primarily on COTS items and student fabrication so we can't spend too much time in this phase. If you have access to automated fabrication or off-line fabrication, you may be able to spend more time in the strategy concept development phase.*

During the strategy portion, there are 3 really key things you can do that will help you gain insight into how the game will actually be played.

#1. Do some sort of game simulation. In 2007, we made a table size version and hung mini-bagels from the spider legs. 2008 No simulation, and we missed the concept of throwing the ball over the bridge (we assumed it would be too dangerous/difficult until the 118 video debuted and then laid on our backs, on the ground, and saw just how simple it would have been to throw the ball, WHOOPS!). 2009, we rolled around on casters pads and threw balls into trailing tubs. We did this after choosing a strategy that year, and missed the powered dumper (whoops!) though looking back we could have seen that in our game play). In 2010, made a little board game that I published on CD Whitepapershttp://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2338.*
#2. Estimate what you think the field of robotics will look like. In 2009, we missed the concept that there would be easy pray in most matches. Therefore having a robot that could rapidly unload a lot of balls very accurately would likely seed really high. Our estimates of the different types of robots, and what they would be able to do was pretty accurate last year. We over-estimated the capability of the "average" robot, but the really god and the really bad estimates were right on. An advanced, but really neat trick is to assign estimated values to the teams at your regional, and run a simulated schedule to see how things will play out. With a little practice and experience, these simulations can produce eerily accurate results. Plus the tools you develop (excel macros and spreadsheets) will be beneficial to actual competition strategy later on.

#3. What would team XYZ do? If your goal is to compete with the best, then try to figure out what they will be doing. We ask ourselves what we think some of the year after year powerhouses will do this year. We were not shocked by 469 choosing that strategy (though they exectued it better than I would have ever dreamed possible). We were surprised that 71 didn't do something very similar. 111, 1114, 254, and 67 were very similar to what we guessed they would end up being (from a functionality standpoint). Beware! If you choose the same strategy as one of these awesome teams, there are some pitfalls.
a. You will not likely execute at the level that these teams can execute. Trying to do the same thing could leave you in the limbo-land of being not very good at several things as opposed to being good at 1 thing.
b. Some games identical designs work well together (2005, 2006, 2008). Some games require specialized roles (2007 ramps and hangers, 2009 a super cell transporter, 2010 needed a home zone, far zone, and mid zone ideally). If you play the same strategy as the really good machines, you may not be a pickable partner.

************************************************** *****
*If you played this game, you would find that the ideal machine could score 1-3 balls in auto, 1 ball every 15 seconds and hang in about 15 seconds. This means that a really good machine would be worth (2 auto, 7 balls during match, and 2 pts hanging). This would be worth 11 pts. There were only a handful that could perform at that level (assuming no defense). If you used the dice and gave a 50% likelihood on scoring the auto and 7 tele-op balls, you would end up with (1pt. auto, 3-4 balls during match, 2 points hanging) or 6-7 points (undefended). There were around 50 or so teams in that camp last year.
If you continued to give it a go with more realistic abilities, you find find the need to have a good striker in the home zone as there will quickly be a pile of balls near the goal needing to be pushed in.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

I think teams overreach because they overestimate what it takes to be good. It's really *not* that hard to play Saturday afternoon. You've just go to think realistically

IKE has good advice about simulating gameplay. I know 40 plays the game with Vex robots. Even just as a though exercise with a single game piece, you can get a realistic number.

It has been my experience that if you can reliably score your starting load in games that have one (Lunacy, Aim High), or score under five times in other kinds of games, you will be a first round or high second round pick at almost any regional.

1276 ended up as the sixth seed at BAE in 2006, and there was only one match where we scored two full loads (20 balls). Most matches we shot between 10-15 and made probably 8-12. The starting load was only 10 balls. We also ended up as the sixth or seventh seed in ATL, but there was some luck involved in this.

In 2007 our scouting data showed that 3 tubes on the rack in a match made for a top 15% robot, but lots of people in the pits claimed they could do six or more. If you had said from the beginning, well 3 tubes will make us competitive, and done a very simple robot that could do just the floor level with a simple, fast mechanism you would've done very well.

In 2008, people in the pits talked of hurdling 4 times on Thursday. Come Saturday at noon, if you averaged two hurdles a match on Friday, you were gone by the 4th pick.

It's all about accurately gauging the competition so you know where you need to stand. TBA is great for this. If this game is similar to a previous years, look at scores on TBA for that game. You can roughly estimate how many times a robot scored from these numbers. Think about that in terms of this game.

As a personal anecdote, 1276 lost a lot of core people after the 2008 season, which we built an extremely complicated "hurdler-thing." We met about half as many build hours in 2009 as we had in 2008. From the start we knew we had to build a simple robot. We ended up seeding in the same place. :cool:

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

We try to look at all strategies as a cost/benefit relationship. Strategy can "cost" all sorts of things -- in game time, real world money, fabrication time, test and adjust time, etc. -- and being able to realistically identify the value of those things is what makes or breaks a team's season.

I've found that discussing this cost as in-game time is the easiest way for our students to properly evaluate the efficacy of different strategies. The mentors are, for the most part, better judges of the impact other concerns have on in-game time and we use our experience and intuition there to guide discussions about, say, how long it'll really take to acquire and score one soccer ball.

The students are then tasked with listing discrete functions the robot must have to implement their strategy and creating a Gantt-like chart that shows when those functions are in use during a match. At the end, we look at the points scored by each function compared to the time spent during the match using it. We want to find functions that provide the highest value -- points scored per second used -- and prioritize those in our strategy.

This system isn't perfect. Certain functions do not score points but act as a "parent" function to those that do. Mobility frequently falls into this category. Other functions that score points are not repeatable and have limited potential. Hanging is usually such a function. The chart allows us to compare, though, the expected value of time spent hanging versus the expected value of time spent scoring soccer balls, say, and determine if the complexity of added functions is worth the other, hidden costs.

Re: Tips on overall robot design procces
 

Wow. This is turning into an amazing thread. I will make sure to incorporate this into our 2011 season. It is great to see how success is achieved, especially when the successful entity is willing to tell of their success.

Thank you all very much!