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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
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IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.
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Competition Weeks Robot Access Time Proposal
Introduction
The FIRST Robotics Competition is full of many dedicated mentors and students, who try to improve on different aspects of how FRC works to inspire more students, grow more teams, create a more sustainable program and increase efficiency. Many of these passionate folks share thoughts and ideas on www.chiefdelphi.com. In a thread on “mentor burnout”,a lot of ideas and thoughts were shared on causes and possible improvements to the long standing FRC season model. The purpose of this letteris to examine a possible change that will improveFRC as a whole.
During the “mentor burnout” discussion, access to the robot was often mentioned on both sides of the burnout issue. The discussion centerson the stop-build date for therobots. Some mentors and students feel that not having a stop-build date wouldforce teams into an exhausting four month build season in order to stay competitive. They also believe that copycatting could run rampant if teams had enough time to rebuild their robot after watching others compete. Others believe that quite the opposite is true. They believe that the short six week build season and limited robot access is to blame for the herculean efforts during build season.Meanwhile practices to stay competitive outside of build season via withholding allowance, practice robots, and radical redesigns are only achievable with substantial monetary and time commitmentsmaking them possible for onlyteams with the highest levels of resources. This group thinks they could “raise the floor” of the competition by making it easier for lower resource teams to do the things higher resource teams already do.
This letteroffers a compromise of keeping the stop-build datewhile expandingunbag time in order to find a happy medium between the completely-open and the six-week-constrained competition models. The basic proposal is to allow some unbag time every week for repairs, development on both mechanical and software fronts, driver practice, and robot demonstration. This proposal is supported by many of the users on the Chief Delphi forum as a good compromise.
The proposal is broken into the following subsections:
1. Stop Build Day – No Change
2. Hands off Period – New addition
3. Unbag time – New Addition
4. Withholding allowance – GDC/FRC Discretion
Stop Build Day – No Change
- Prevents team procrastination
- Prevents complications inevitable with a major change
This proposal advocates keeping a build season of the current six week length with a firm stop built date at least one week before the first competition for several reasons. The primary driver behind this is to avoid procrastination on the robot up to the competition. We want teams to have functioning robots when they go to compete. Allowing teams to work up until the competition date will substantially increase the number of teams fieldingnon-fully functional robots. (This procrastination effect can be seen at work in many collegiate “build and compete” competitions such as Formula SAE, Mini-Baja, andSolarcar.) We also recognize that teams have learned to work within the constraints of the six week season and that people, in general, are resistant to change. Not altering the current build season prevents any unforeseen negative complications, logistical or otherwise, for both FIRST and the FRC teams.
Hands-Off Period after Stop Build Date – Add (propose one week)
- Mitigates student and mentor “burnout”
- Prevents week one teams from being at a disadvantage
This proposal advocates a mandatory hands-off-robot period of approximately one week for several reasons. The driving factor for this is preventing burnout. We recognize that the current 6 week build season asks a lot from bothstudents and mentors. Allowing a week for participants to cool down mitigates burnout while reinforcing the Stop Build Date. It also eliminates any disadvantage that teams competing in week one would otherwise be at. While some teams could get around this one week hiatus with a practice robot, the overall need for a practice robot will be greatly reduced by the additional time teams will have to work with in the following weeks.
Unbag Time for each week following “hands-off” week (propose 8 hours/week)
This proposal advocates using theRobot Access Period already in place for district teams to across all of FRC. While non-district teams have a practice day at their competition,unbag time has some distinct advantages which make it preferable over a practice day. In nearly every case, it is more efficient for teams to update and test their robot in their own shop where they have access to all of their tools and don’t have to wait in lines to use a practice field for five minutes at a time. This extra time before the competition allows teams to be more prepared coming into the event resulting in a faster inspection process, shorter lines for the practice field, and potentially more matches as extra time opens up that was previously reserved for practice and inspection. From a learning perspective these unbag windows complement the six-week build season in teaching time management as students plan out how they want to use their 8 hours in one-hour increment. From a publicity standpoint, with 8 hours of unbagtime, teams can now demo their robots during the competition season furthering FIRST’s goal of “making it loud”.
While district competitions already have unbag time implemented for weeks on which a team is competing, this proposal advocates expanding un-bagging to every week. The reason for this is simple; we want to give teams as much opportunity as possible to succeed. A 2012 survey conducted by FRC team 33 at the World Championship shows that the vast majority of the top 100 (OPR) teams at the event had some sort of practice robot or practice system. What the survey effectively shows is that the very successful teams have already implemented an artificial unbag window when they improve and drive a second practice robot they built in addition to their competition robot. While it is unrealistic to ever expect lower resource teams to build a practice robot, we can mitigate the need for one by expanding access to the competition robot, allowing teams to take the robot they finished on Stop Build day and improve it to make it the best it can be.
It is important to stress that the intention behind the iteration phase is for teams to improve their robots – not build new ones. Controlling the amount of access time will allow FIRST to directly limit how easy it is for copycats and clean sheet re-design to occur. We expect many teams might copy an element or reverse engineer a part of another team’s robot. However,teams actually enjoy this sharing and semi-open source nature to the competition and feel that it is an important part of iteration and continuous improvement.
This addition will not only improve FRC, but will mitigate mentor burnout in addition to adding an important iteration phaseto the FRC engineering process. The overall idea is pretty simple: allow for unbag time over the course of the competition season.
Here is a summary of the benefits for this element:
• Drastically reduce the need to build a practice robot, save time, money and reduce stress.
• Some teams that used to build a practice robot can now meet less hours per week and still be able to finish the competition robot. Reduce burnout.
• Middle tier teams that did not build practice robots before will be more competitive and the gap will be narrowed between the top and middle tiered teams.
• Teams that can only afford to attend one event will have the same amount of access to their robot comparing to teams that attend multiple events prior to the competition.
• Veteran teams can now help the rookie and bottom tier teams since they have access to their robot during the 8 hours each week. This will raise the bottom and narrow the gap and make the event more competitive and exciting to watch.
• Allow pre-inspection to take place by volunteers* (piloted at MEZ during unbag time window before week 3 Detroit event this year).
• Allow real world development phase, students more inspired by learning from improving their robots.
• Allow robots to reach their full potential.
• Do in-season sponsor/advertising/media (making it loud) visits without requesting special waivers/approvals.
• More in-season scrimmages can be held to benefit all and not just teams with practice robots.
• Additional run time on competition robot allows for some level of durability testing which results in improvingthe reliability of robots at competitions.
*The pre-inspection event at the MEZ this year was not an official inspection, but a review with teams during their unbag time for repairs that would be difficult to do at an FRC event. These repairs included frame perimeter violations, bumper issues, wrong wire sizes, and general pneumatics compliance issues. In 2012, only 30/40 teams were ready to compete when matches started. In 2013, 36/40 were through inspection, and an additional 2 made it through inspection before their first match. The two that were not through were likely by choice of the team (a no-show, and a team that would not accept help). With more weeks available of un-bag time, more “pre-inspection” events could be established to help with the major issues being caught before teams make it to their events.
Withholding Allowance – Keep and modify by FIRST each year as needed
This area can largely be left to the discretion of the GDC based on how much they want teams to change their robots over the course of the season. Current weights have been large enough to do major system redesign efforts or make repairs to a frame. Some teams have relied on it in order to make a pseudo-practice bot utilizing easily removable parts of the competition robot.
Keep Season Short as Option
There will be teams that do not like changes and want to keep everything the way it is. There are also teams who want to work 6 weeks and stop but also want everybody else to stop for fear of being at a disadvantage. This proposal can allow teams that option. All they have to do is go to a week 1 or week 2 event and they will be on an even playing field with other teams.
Implementation
Since there will be a lot more bag lock and unlock to keep track of, we propose to modify the Robot Lockup form. One example is attached (designed by the coach of Team 1640 who is also a robot inspector at events). We want to make it easier for robot inspectors to check the hours. Instead of checking if teams exceeded 8 hours each week, all the robot inspectors need to check is the total number of opened hoursprior to the competition. What it means is 8 hours per week on average. For example, if a team attends a Week 4 event, they can have up to 32 hours of access time. For a team that attends a Week 2 event, they can have up to 16 hours of access time. They can use all 16 hours in the first week and 0 hours in the second week. This makes it fairer for teams that have to crate and ship their robot, and make it more flexible for other teams with limited access to their shop.
Summary
By allowing for additional unbag time over the competition season, FRC can benefit from creating a development/iteration window that currently only exists for teams building practice robots or competing at many events within the district system. This development time increases teams’ competitiveness and improves their overall likelihood of having a successful season. By keeping the traditional six weeks and Stop Build day, FRC will keep procrastination to a minimum and continue to exhibit real-world deadlines. We think that this proposal is a win-win for teams and FRC as a whole and we sincerely hope that you will support it.
Warm Regards,
Isaac Rife (Team 33 mentor, BAE Systems Engineer)
Ed Law (Team 2834 coach, Chrysler Engineer), Kristen Law (Team 2834 team captain, 2013 Dean's List Winner)
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