Dealing with robotics regrets

[anonymous_robot]

I would say that it is safe to say that everyone has had something they were not proud of performance wise occur in relation to robotics. For me it is flawed designs that I did not push back hard enough to get the design that would have worked. To me things like that are haunting and really cause me to be ashamed of my work. I am sure that I am not the only person who has had issues with something they wish they could have done better. So my question is how do deal with the regrets you have around robotics?

[DonRotolo]

Same as regrets in life: Learn from them.

This is called "growth".

[artdutra04]

There are three main mantras:

1. Nobody is perfect.

2. Don't make the same mistake twice.

3. Life is iterative.

We're all human, we all make mistakes. How you deal with mistakes and problems, is what really elevates successful people, robotics teams, organizations, etc above the rest.

Whenever you finish any major project, you should always sit back and reflect upon what you did good, and what could be done better. Be honest with yourself - if something was terrible, come to accept it. Don't blame other people/events/etc! It's way too easy to fall into a trap that "if only X random event didn't occur, we would have won!", when you should be working on making yourself/your team immune to X random event.

I personally tend to follow the "Toyota philosophy" that initial mistakes are the result of bad process - not necessarily bad people. Analyze what went wrong and what could have prevented it, then take action on implementing new ideas/processes to prevent the mistake from occurring again.

For a long time, the "what went wrong" will all likely revolve around lack of experience. The only cure for this is to keep getting back on the horse when you get kicked off. The more you practice, the more you do, the more you reflect on what you're doing, the better you get. It will take years and years (it has been referred to as the "10,000 hours of deliberate practice"), but one day you'll look back and realize that you're no longer making all those mistakes that you once were.

[Ginger Bread]

Only regret from my rookie and only season so far: fork lift

[Munchskull]

Originally Posted by Ginger Bread

Only regret from my rookie and only season so far: fork lift

I feel you man, my biggest regrets are:

1.this years elevator design

2.not making a Frisbee shooter in 2013

[BrendanB]

The usual robot related stuff like over valuing the ability to cap an existing six stack with an RC that made our robot a jack of all trades and master of none.

While I was mentoring a team I really regret losing focus on what this is all about. Having a competitive spirit is good and winning can lead to inspiration on its own, but that competitive side can really put a damper on the ability to work with students. There's a thread that usually comes around every once and a while about mentoring fresh out of high school. If you decide to take that road (and let's keep that discussion in those threads), really ask yourself and more experienced mentors/adults around you, "How can I be a better mentor for the students?" I wish I did.

Regardless. Learn and move on. You can never take something back or go back in time. Consider how you can prevent it from happening moving forward and remember those mistakes when you come across similar circumstances.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Learn from your mistakes and move forward. That's what I try to do every year.

I've made questionable calls as a drive coach that I still think about. I'll never forget telling our 2014 drive team to go for another high goal shot when a low goal would have secured the match and turned the St. Louis regional rankings upside down (Link: http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2014mosl_qm80 Sorry 1658 & 2408) I've watched that match video more times than I'd like to admit.

As many have said, you get better through experience. FRC isn't easy. The fact that you are worried about what you did wrong is actually a great thing. It means you want to improve - now the trick is figuring out how to do that. Focusing on one or two things each year is a good way to start, depending on your team size. If you get a little better each year soon enough your team will be great.

[Munchskull]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

As many have said, you get better through experience. FRC isn't easy. The fact that you are worried about what you did wrong is actually a great thing. It means you want to improve - now the trick is figuring out how to do that. Focusing on one or two things each year is a good way to start, depending on your team size. If you get a little better each year soon enough your team will be great.

I think one of the harder parts about FRC and improving is that many of us use build season as a metric for improvement. This becomes a problem because buildseason is only once a year and so you don't get the instant feedback that people like to have.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by Munchskull

I think one of the harder parts about FRC and improving is that many of us use build season as a metric for improvement. This becomes a problem because buildseason is only once a year and so you don't get the instant feedback that people like to have.

You should use the entire year to judge improvement. Build season is the test, the time to apply your knowledge that you've gained over the off-season and from previous seasons. Grade how your build season went and realize that studying and preparing for it will often make it go a lot smoother. Very few can just show up to the test without preparing and ace it

[Mitchell1714]

The one experience I still have some regrets on is 2013. Our team built a well designed 50 point corner climber, which actually did work very well. My regret was not pushing harder for a corner climber that could carry 2 other robots up with it. It probably would have failed epically but I can't help but think we could have been one of the best robots in FRC.

[Rman1923]

In my mind, there isn't anything to regret when you fail during the season. It's all a lesson. For instance, our 2014 season, not gonna lie, was crap. The manipulator (Four marshmallow wheel shooter) was actually really good and the standard 6 tread traction wheel drive was fine, but the combo of both was deadly (for us). We actually did amazing in our first competition (Mt. Olive District) or for at least the first day. because we had a drop in our DT, every time we angled our shooter with the piston, the whole robot rocked back and forth. This is fine when we were stationary and shooting, because we'd wait for the rocking to stop and then shoot when ready, but during day 2, teams figured out that we can't play at all against defense or shoot while driving. So we got stuffed the second day and we learned a lot. The main problem of the season though, was we didn't know when to stop modifying. we changed the intake so it could intake faster and at wider angles, which ended up not working. we also made several small adjustments so that we could try to shoot and drive, but they were sorta unreliable and I can't honestly say they worked well. At the end of our season we had a bot with several things added to it and kinda rachet honestly and it didn't work too well. So for the 2015 season we designed a new ten-wheel drive (during off-season) that stayed flat so there was no possibility of rocking. We also agreed we wouldn't use drive-in-a-day (it showed up week three last build season) and that we would exclusively use VEX and versaFrame. So we fixed the rachetness issues as well as the drive train issues. We also built a more robust robot that wouldn't need too many fixes or mods from the get go. The major thing we did was change team culture and rules so that modifications had to be reviewed by both the mentors and students before they could go on. All of this contributed to the success of this season. We wouldn't have made SF in TVR or Mt. Olive and we wouldn't have been QF in MARCMP and North Brunswick had it not been for this overhaul. And we keep learning through the season. in the beginning we could maybe do some 5 stacks on the platform. But by the end of comp season (including IRI) we were able to do three stacks of six with noodled cans even after Can-burgling (third fastest in the world).

TL;DR: My main point is that regrets in robotics are your curriculum. They are they way teams get better and no team hasn't messed up before. Without these teaching moments, I honestly can't say that we would've been this successful and I honestly can't say I would've had so much fun building the robot. These regrets teach you to out-smart challenges and engineer something better.

[pandamonium]

Fail Often, Fail Fast, Fail Cheap. Failure does not lead to regrets. Not failing enough, early enough, and especially when there is low risk is from my experience what leads to regrets. As I plan the year I try to create failure opportunities and learning experiences in pre season.

[GeeTwo]

My biggest personal regret regarding robotics was the team's second year, and my first year (2013 Ultimate Ascent). I was mechanical mentor for our secondary function (that is, climb); my experience with antisubmarine warfare through the 90's and 00's (and before and since) set me up to work around another "more important" function. "Team Foundation" (drive and Frisbee thrower, herein referred to as TF) had built what they felt was a good device to accelerate and spin a Frisbee (and it was great after a few more tweaks). They had not yet figured out how to lift a Frisbee from "the stack" at the bottom of the ramp into the first spinning pneumatic wheel. I verbally pitched a pneumatically-powered "finger" that would push from inside the lowest Frisbee. No one got the idea, and everyone else's idea was much more complex, so I decided to take things literally into my own hands. I walked around the build space, "cutting" aluminum bar through metal fatigue, doing a bit of rough hand bending, and bungeed a working prototype lifter into place on the build frame before the discussion died down. Once people saw it work, it took little time before it was "plan A". TF put in metal bars to mount the cylinder, but they did not replace the metal-fatigue-cut finger. I tried to convince TF that the finger was a prototype that needed to be done right, but they resisted the idea and I GAVE UP TOO QUICKLY.
Fast forward to Bayou: By now, we were putting 95+% of our shots taken from our sweet spot (essentially under the pyramid) into the 3 point (highest) goal. Once we worked out how to load from the station (which was built well outside of specification), we were a real competitor - when nothing went wrong! We had matches where we forgot to close the manual pressure relief valve, and it seemed like everything that could be set wrong was set wrong in at least one match. Despite our extreme case of TRS (twitchy robot syndrome), we managed to rank #20 (to this day, the only time we've ranked in the top 24). We were not selected for playoffs, and might have declined if we had been, because we were not ready to compete. It seems that our jury-rigged pneumatic "lift finger" had jammed beyond any easy repair. Shannon (another mentor), I, and a couple of students worked in the pits for about an hour trying to fix the lifter mechanism. After playoffs had run through a full cycle and we were nowhere near finishing, we called off the repair and started loading the trailer. It was literally well over a year (summer 2014) before we revived the Frisbee launcher. These days, our "no mentor prototypes on the competition robot" rule would have ensured replacement by a student-built part, but I've also learned to be more assertive in fixing problems in general.

This is a particular case of the general rule given several times above: don't forget, learn.

[Christopher149]

Originally Posted by Munchskull

I feel you man, my biggest regrets are:

1.this years elevator design

2.not making a Frisbee shooter in 2013

I must be old, because the elevators I regret are from 2008, 2010, and 2011. 2015 is me (as a mentor) learning from those 3 high school years.

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by Christopher149

I must be old, because the elevators I regret are from 2008, 2010, and 2011. 2015 is me (as a mentor) learning from those 3 high school years.

That brings up a good point about regrets. It's very easy to overly generalize a regret. The fact that you regret your team's elevator says very little about the quality of elevators as a concept. There have been many great elevators before, and many great elevators will come after. Instead of swearing off elevators forever, and potentially overlooking them in a situation where they'd be a great idea, why don't you try to figure out what specific details of your elevator you regret? Even then, it's very unlikely that the correct answer is as simple as "part X is bad." More likely, a good answer is along the lines of "part X shouldn't be used in combination with motor power Y if we aren't also able to completely prevent the elevator from relying on hard stops."

In engineering, good regrets are usually very specific.