[DFTF] Budgeting for a Competitive Robot...

[Peter Matteson]

The rookie number the number I came up with was so high because I assumed the following: No spare motors, full legal amount of CIMS, no pnuematics lying around the shop, no motor controllers, wire, electrical connectors, fasteners, not sure of the raw material stock...

Originally Posted by ayeckley

I understand Joe's situation; I'm referring to the veterans that describe spending more to build their robot each year than is intuitive to me. Perhaps I'm expecting everyone to be as thrifty as we are (out of necessity).

I get what your saying, but I see the opposite side of things. There are many crip crap items that will chew a budget quick if you don't have a stockpiled inventory of small items that people seem to forget you need to buy. These things aren't necessarily in the robot BOM because that rules don't require it. That's why I say a $3500 budget robot really cost about $4000 to build. As I stated earlier add shipping costs to get the parts and that bill goes higher.

Anyone who claims they can build a robot for under $2000 is either re-using a ot of COTS, motor controllers, and pnuematics from old robots or has drastically under estimated the value of items that they have scrounged as well as consumables that don't factor into the robots BOM cost.

When I start to add up costs or mill bits, grinding wheels, argon, tungston, weld wire, emory cloth, drill bits, carbide inserts, bandsaw blades, cutting oil, tap magic, taps, loctite, sander belts, etc. The costs become high very quickly. I feel like a lot people here have overlooked these types of items, granted not everyone uses all of these, but they are REAL COSTS in factoring the TRUE PRICE to build a robot. I'm not even touching upon buying capital equipment like tools and machines that you can use for years,

I'm just trying to add up all those little items that on many teams just show up in the shop because people go and buy them on their own. Speaking from experience myself and 3 of the other engineers on my team in some of our leaner years have spent upwards of $500 each on these types of items, prototyping materials, and field parts.

[Ninja_Bait]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

This is pretty straightforward for me.

A competitive robot is one that is virtually always playing in the elims and, moreover, is drafted in the first round in more often than not*.

This sounds kind of weird to me; when a team is only going to one or two regionals a year, having their robot "always playing in the elims" is a silly kind of statement. That sounds more like a competitive team to me, one that has played enough years to justify the above trend.

I think it should be more along the lines of "usually wins their matches and is a likely pick for elims". That leads to the same result as what you said, but is a little bit clearer from a statistical point of view. It will be easier to gauge the trend off of 2 dozen matches than off of two alliance selection rounds.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

This is pretty straightforward for me.

A competitive robot is one that is virtually always playing in the elims and, moreover, is drafted in the first round in more often than not*.

If this is your definition of a competitive robot, then more importantly budget your time. Having the time to debug your robot is very key. We ran our robot for about 2 hours before our first regional which was enough time to find out that: our supershifters stopped shifting due to an issue when we assembled them, our arm needed a balance of surgical tubing to lift the tubes, and some code malfunctions. On Thursday at our regional we never had a practice match in which everything worked and we found out more: pnuematics on the deployment were an issue, a piston came loose, more code issues, and another supershifter malfunction. Come friday morning our robot never broke down for the rest of the season including champs, we averaged around 30 points all weekend doing one low logo and a first place minibot, and were the first pick of the 5th seed in a very deep week one regional.

Our robot was extremely basic, we bought a kitbot on steroids from AM (kit chassis, 6wd 6in plactions, and supershifters *no longer sold by AM but it will cost a couple hundred more to buy the components themselves), some 1x1x1/8in aluminum tubing for the base, kit drawer slides and piston for the deployment, and some more tubing and a small piston for the claw driven by two window motors and tada you have our robot.

I don't know what our BOM was however most of the cost was starting costs as a rookie with the metals, cims, controls system, wiring, etc. It is also really hard to budget what a competitive robot is. I can look at a other teams who did worse than us at our regional but had more on their robot in materials, electronics, etc. You can throw as much money as you want at a robot but that won't make it a winner.

Only you know what your team is capable of putting out (ours was about 9 students with a majority freshman). We stuck with what was simple and wound up falling back from the second row to the bottom and we were thrilled with the results. In short: keep it simple, get it done!

[Joe Johnson]

Originally Posted by Ninja_Bait

This sounds kind of weird to me; when a team is only going to one or two regionals a year, having their robot "always playing in the elims" is a silly kind of statement.

First of all, I didn't say "always" I said, "virtually always" and then I went on to explain in my caveats, the most appropriate one I quote below:

Of course there are competitive robots that fall through the cracks. But I am talking about a statistical idea, a sort of thought experiment: imagine that the same regional were run 100 times in 100 parallel universes, a competitive robot would be drafted or drafting 95+% of the time and, if not a drafting team, drafted in the top 8 50+% of the time.

This comes from the idea that a competitive robot should be competing to do something. What? Well, for me that means to win the competition. How do you do that? You have to be playing after lunch on Saturday. If you don't make it to the elims, your robot was likely not competitive (or you were unlucky, or your team had a reputation for being jerks, or ... which I cover in another caveat).



As to whether two drafts will tell me more about the competitiveness of at team (and their robot) than W-L-T record with 24 matches, of course it does!

Karthik and kin, back me up here!

So... ...among the goals I have set for my rookie team is to build a competitive robot. Yes, there are larger goals and we are working on those as well. But I do think that there is a minimum capability robot that meets my definition.

Great drivers can do a lot, great planning can do a lot, great scouting can do a lot... ...but a box-o-rox is just not going to get make it to the Elims better than 95% of the times they compete (again, in a thought experiment sense not literally).

Bottom line: I am trying to gauge what I should budget for this activity.

Joe J.

[Ninja_Bait]

I understand what you're saying, but I still think that success in a match environment is more indicative of robot quality than success in the competition structure. Let's agree to disagree before this turns into an nasty semantics-slinging fight.

What BrendanB said was very wise - inventiveness can trump money any day. In 2009, the very competitive "number 7"/"roller-dumper" bots were probably possible with a $500 budget (the KOP, 2x4s, PVC, lexan and belting was basically all it took). In 2011, a similarly cheap but competitive robot was probably possible, though I can't think off of the top of my head what you'd have to do to get it - the game is also a factor in what kind of money you'll need.

$1500 is an admirable and probably achievable goal; if only every team could pull it off, FIRST would be all the richer. But this question is ultimately unanswerable. Experience can tell you so much, but any curveball will totally flip experience upside down. I seriously doubt that $1500 is enough to cushion the team from huge mistakes or massive changes in the game, and this is coming from a team that has never spent less than its $8000 engineering budget (of which the robot was probably only half our expenditures). If you can get the extra money, do it - if you don't use it you lose nothing, but if you don't have when you need it, you'll lose 6 weeks of hard work.

[Jon Stratis]

Pulled straight from our budget sheet:
2011 - $1900 spent "for the robot" (includes spare parts and some new tooling, but not a lot).

Is it possible to build a robot for less? Yes, absolutely. If you have a firm budget, however, I suggest you start with some significant planning the first week or two of build season.

Figure out what you want to build, then figure out how much it will cost to build that. Start taking out capabilities until you're within your budget.

Alternatively, come up with an "incremental" design - you can add on assemblies/capabilities in stages, and stop when the money runs out. We did this with Overdrive to alleviate worry that we wouldn't have time to do everything we wanted. First, focused on getting something that could drive around the track and score points that way (only two balls per alliance = 1 team won't be interacting much with a ball). Next, build our mechanism for handling a ball - essentially sucking it onto the top of the robot, and spitting it out. If needed, that can be bolted right onto the drive base and we're done. Finally, build the elevator that's going to let us hurdle the ball. This way we gradually increased capabilities without requiring that everything is finished to have a functioning robot.

[Bob Steele]

I don't think that win-loss record is a very good indicator of competitiveness.
It certainly says something about a robot.
I do think that being picked for eliminations is a much better indicator.

My reasoning here is that matches are completely random and a team can (and often does) win matches not based on their own ability.

Teams are picked (and note that I say picked and not seeded) because other teams think they are competitive.

The issue here is that what about the seeded teams? Most would be considered competitive.

I also think that a robot needs to be reliable...

We could consider these three factors to be Robot Seed + Robot "attractiveness as a partner" + Robot Reliability

I would propose that a value for competitiveness (for a robot) be a synthesis of something like this:

[(some constant) X Number times seeded/ number of regionals] + [(some constant) X number times picked for eliminations / number of regionals] + [(some constant) X number of matches that the robot is functional on the field / number of matches scheduled for robot]

I would have to do some numerical evaluation with teams that we consider to be competitive to come up with values for the constants. I would think that my initial reaction is that the weight (or constant) for picking should be higher than the other two.

Just my ideas.
A competitive robot does not mean a great team... and we are talking robots here.

[IndySam]

We get a $3000 budget from our school for robot parts and tools. We always spend every penny + This year we have already spent a big chunk on new cRio chassis.

But we also build at least an extra drivetrain and enough extra stuff to have a effective practice robot (we use every bit of our withholding allowance we can to help reduce coats.)

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

...
Can I build a competitive robot for $1,500 plus the KOPs?
..

Yes, (assuming you have the assets you listed), but it will be difficult. If at all possible, try to double that. Doubling it will allow for the possibility of 2 different successful strategies.
1. Build 2 simple yet relatively effective robots and use the one for practice, development, and more practice.

2. Build a more complicated robot that uses a lot of good COTS parts (that aren't cheap) and thus free up development time on game piece manipulators, collectors, or whatever other custom stuff is needed. This will also allow you to "waste" some funds on things you don't "need". "Waste" would be defined as ordering the $50-250 dollars worth of stuff that you think you need, but by the end of build find you are not using. This buffer reduces the budget stresses that can drive a team lead crazy.

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This season I had the pleasure of watching the OCCRA (Oakland county Competitive Robotics Association) Championship. OCCRA has pretty strict student build and tool usage limitations that require teams to keep it relatively simple to construct. Robots are about 2ft x 3ft x 3ft, so just a bit smaller than FIRST. Of the 20 teams, there are only a couple that I would estiamte would have broken $1500. Because the teams get to keep working on their robot, the "path" they follow tends to be more like path #1 from above. The game was a lot like FRC2005 (Triple Play), but used balls instead of Tetras. By the end of the season. Almost every team could score, and over 1/2 of teh field could score 4+ game pieces. In a pick and place game, having this capability will put you in the top 25% or better which should make you a captain or first round pick at most regionals. The OCCRA teams get there by having more development time and more practice driving than FRC teams get. Similar behaviours occur in VEX where students have more time to test/tune/tweak. The practice bot, or doing multiple events does this in FRC.

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If you want to make it to Einstein, then I would listen to Peter from 177. They seem to have the approach down.

[Brandon Holley]

Joe-

I would post our numbers, but they would more or less be duplicates of Pete's.

As I'm sure you remember from a few years ago, there are always little do-dads that add up over the course of a season. Tools, spare motors, etc. it tends to add up.

As far as your goals for robot/team performance- ours are more or less the same. My experience is telling me that $1500 may be able to get you to a competitive robot, but if you want to build a "rock star" robot, I think you will need to be closer to double that number at a minimum.

Bottom line: I think you should give yourself a larger budget to get the robot you are looking for.

-Brando