Team organization issues and Build Season Schedule

[RoboMaster]

I won't personally comment on everything you said, I'll let others help with that, but I'll try to give some advice from my experience.

I very much agree with spending a good long time on clarifying the game plan (you said you wanted more than 3 hours). I have a question and a suggestion for this later on, but here's some other advice first. The rest of your team might not understand the importance of the design process, or they may think it's important but just doesn't need as much time as you think it does. Which is it?
That is helpful to know when you're trying to counter their opinions. In fact, learning more about what they think can help you better understand the topic in general, since you include all viewpoints, allowing you to see what really is the best. It also helps keep you from seeing their views too negatively.

Now, what is your/your team's definition of a "game plan"? I ask because I want to warn you not to finalize such an idea too early on. I've seen that picking the overall strategy for the team/robot is very closely related to the specific robot designs that accomplish that strategy. You need to think about both almost at the same time to be able to judge which strategy is the best. For example, if you lock down a strategy in the beginning, but then later realize that it is simply to impractical to build robots to match that strategy, you need to change your overall focus. And that's hard to come back, start over, or do on the fly. I would suggest being open to all ideas and strategies for a day or two, and then when you understand the possibilities of the different strategies, you can better finalize one.


Also, it's great that you're going to discuss things with your leader to improve things, but expect that things still might not end up the way you want it. In big groups like this people will always disagree with you, and if it's a majority or a person of leadership above you, it might be best to just let it go. Your team still might not crash and burn and you can still have a good time. Furthermore, if you disagree and fight too much, it can make the issue worse and waste time. So be careful how you approach this, and for what personal reasons you may be doing it for.

[Anupam Goli]

I think my team is more underestimating the amount of time it takes to create a definite strategy, and i don't know if they understand that the design criteria do come straight from it.

I'm going to use Logomotion in my example of a game plan. I would first read the rules of the game, then make a chart that shows what makes you gain and lose points. From that chart, i would discuss the best way to gain points. THen we would look at how that would work on a model of the field. So for instance, with last year's game, We list the penalties and scoring ways. Then we talk about scoring on the top being the most productive, and then we look at having human players toss tubes vs handing them off to us. From there, we have a game plan of

- Pick up logos
- score on the highest pegs
- be able to pick up from the ground
- be able to pick up from feeder station

And based on that, we can start to say the robot has to be fast to get the tubes, Has to be able to pick tubes from the ground and carry them to the top pegs, Be accurate with the placement of the tube, Be simple, fast, and accurate in its execution, etc. In my opinion, all of this takes longer than 3 hours to do, especially if we make sure we all know the rules and do the chart for scoring and weigh the pros and cons of different ways of scoring. This also leads directly into the design, where we come up with criteria based on our model field and simulating the running of this strategy, which leads to robot concepts, and prototyping.