Challenges of small teams with fewer than 10 students

[chi-town-biker]

Now that everyone has bagged their robots, I thought I’d ask what approaches other small teams use to manage their season. Robotic Colonels is three years old and has eight students who attend a high school with about 350 students. Our students vary in skills/abilities that I think is typical for an FRC team. We compete in FTC in the fall and the Midwest FRC regional in the winter.

One of the obvious differences between a small team and a large team is the total number of student hours available during the build season. Every team commits a fixed number of hours building a basic drive system, field elements, bumpers, programs and a practice bot. For a small team, these fixed hours are a larger portion of the total available student hours than a large team.

I’d like to share what we’ve learned and hope that other small teams will share their wisdom. For example, this year we decided before kickoff that we were going to build the kitbot on steroids. We knew upfront that it wouldn’t be the ideal drive system but that it would be a better than average drive regardless of the game and save us time. It’s worked well and I think we’ll do it again next year.

Right after kickoff we take a different approach to analyzing the game because we are a small team. It’s not practical for us to design and build the perfect robot. Instead, we focus on what we can build that would make an ideal second or third alliance pick. This year we built a feeder/defensive bot. But primarily we focused on three bot balancing. Our robot’s COG is purposefully set far to the right and has a set of wheels that ride on top of the 2x2 bridge rail. This lets us hang 60% of the robot off the side of the bridge leaving enough room for two long robots to balance with us.

I’m not complaining or suggesting FIRST change any rules. We’re interested in the experiences of other small teams and any tips or advice they can pass on. When you reply, please mention how many students are on your team.