The Quest for Einstein

[Mr V]

Originally Posted by who716

4. populated student body with interest- lots of students.

Trust me they have that one covered, with more than 100 students last season.

[who716]

Originally Posted by dodar

6. Corndogs - Lots of Corndogs

AH yes the infamous corndogs.

Originally Posted by Mr V

Trust me they have that one covered, with more than 100 students last season.

I cant imagine being on a team with over 100 kids that sound like chaos, my team is 9 members

[Knufire]

Originally Posted by who716

1. money- lots of money

2. engineers- lots of engineers

3. Equipment- lots of equipment

4. populated student body with interest- lots of students.

I don't necessarily agree with these. Are they extremely helpful? Yes, but I think the amount of resources (human and material) of several "elite" teams would surprise you.

Student interest, however, is absolutely necessary. If you truly inspire your kids to want to be the best, they will put in the required effort and time to bring the program to that level.

On a seperate note, I think one of the biggest differentating factors between the upper-mid tier of teams and the elite teams is drive practice. Built an identical robot, find space for a practice field, and be practicing 5-7 days a week from when you finish that practice robot until the day you leave for the championship event. Not only will your drivers be using your robot to it's absolute potential, but the many, many hours of runtime on your practice robot will let you discover failure points of your robot well before they ever occur on the competition robot. This allows you to preemptively fix these failure points before they ever occur during a competition match.

Don't be afraid to iterate mid-season, even drastically. Always be improving performance of your robot.

Meticilous attention to strategy and match prep. Look no further than 1678 last year to see exactly how this should be done.

Make friends. You'll never know when you'll need a helping hand or a piece of advice.

Seasons are often made or broken in the first week of build season. 1114 wouldn't be repeatedly giving their strategic design seminar if it wasn't that important. Recovering from misreading the game is extremely hard.

The typical solutions you see around you year-to-year aren't the only ones. Don't be afraid to break out of your location's norms. FIRST games are played quite different from region to region. Try new things during the off-season.

Don't get discouraged. Developing a consistent program takes time. If you think the elite teams have made it and are just crusing along, you're mistaken. Competing at an elite level in FRC is extremely hard; an old mentor of mine claimed that FRC was much harder than his senior automotive engineering position, due to the time requirements. Build season will force you to work harder than you thought possible. It won't always be fun, and sometimes it will be very much the opposite. Stick it through, and you might be surprised what you can accomplish.

[JesseK]

1. Replace 'money' with 'focused creativity' and a team can make it to Einstein.

7. Attitude. It takes mental discipline, supporting families and willpower to do what it takes to adapt to the higher levels of competition, especially after a Regional.

8. Scouting, or Experience. The best teams in the world get wrecked without good partners or a good gameplan.

[MrForbes]

Face it, it takes some type of magic that most of us don't have quite enough of.

When you figure out what the magic is, or how it works, please let us know!

[BrendanB]

I think the better goal here is how to move forward to become a consistent high performing robot at the Championship not just a goal of being on Einstein. Let's face it there are many, MANY amazing robots and teams each year who don't make it to Einstein because so many little elements determine where you seed, what alliance you end up on, and who you face.

Something to remember is you have to be able to make it to the Championship. You can't compete at an event you aren't qualified for which starts at your first event. Many teams who are quoted for their amazing designs that end up back up on Einstein or are consistent favorites for deep in elimination runs like 67, 148, 254, 1114, etc. have HOF or Legacy status that gives them an invitation to the Championship each year. This means they have the "net" that they can go a little more complex than you because their goal is to win the championship (in addition to every event the attend) but that goal doesn't ride on them having to qualify at a regional/district in order to get there. Many teams bite off more than they can chew because they are focused to deep in the season.

Drive practice and committed students are HUGE. Its one thing to have a practice bot. Its another to have a group of students who strive for perfection and the best performance possible. A very high majority of teams are held back because of their drivers not the mechanisms they built.

You need to iterate through the season to make your robot perform better and like it was said before you can't be afraid of drastic changes. Many robots can hit a cap on their performance which some drivers will hit during practice or have a robot that can't adapt well to the higher levels of play we see at the Championship. Sometimes its iterating your mechanisms, your programming, your strategy, or how you drive the robot but never settle for "good enough".

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

....to have a group of students who strive for perfection and the best performance possible..

This is the part where magic is involved.

Some folks are magicians, and can consistently make this happen.

[c.shu]

Some things my team tries to focus on:

Pick a winning strategy - Directly after kick-off we try to pick a strategy where we think we can seed high at any level of competition. This is usually based on how many points we can score with a given strategy.

Stick with it - Once we have chosen our strategy, we do what we can to not deviate from it. You don't have time during build season to be indecisive or change your mind halfway through.

Keep it simple - Building a simple robot is extremely important. The more things you have going on with your robot is just more things to fail during a match. Try to keep it down to just a few simple mechanisms that can do a lot instead of a lot of mechanisms that do one thing. Our robot last year was about as simple as they come, but it was very effective.

Don't reinvent the wheel - If there is something out there that works great for what you need, use it. Maybe you can modify it to better suit your situation but generally you don't need to come up with something brand new to be competitive.

Keep improving - Just because build season ends doesn't mean improving your robot goes with it. In the past we have used our withholding allowance to replace entire mechanisms because they were better than the originals.

Good Scouting - At competition it is crucial that you know what every robot there is good/bad at and how they compliment your game. Even your weakest partners are useful for something, it just takes a little creativity to figure out how they can best help win a match.

Hope this helps

[Vupa]

Luck. For lower-tier teams luck plays a large role. This is luck in design (stumbling upon the right design early), luck in build season (stars align and your build season goes smoothly), luck in competition (match schedules, high tier teams noticing you, etc.).

Of course luck isn't everything, but it definitely is something. The points everyone else has mentioned are all very important (maybe not the corn dogs), but to overcome the luck barrier means that you need to have a ginormous base of skills and knowledge. Even great teams fail to beat out bad luck with raw robotics expertise.

The only way to overcome luck (besides being lucky), is to eliminate places where luck may play a role. Although impossible in some places such as match schedules and certain aspects of competition a lot of the time you can replace luck with large amounts of dedication. This is dedication in literally everything: design, strategy, driver practice, scouting, learning, etc.

In example, build season has started and your ready to go, to eliminate luck in design, you need to put the effort into prototyping every mechanism you find viable, this means having a crew of people working around the clock to find the right design for your resources and skill level. Look through concepts on Chief Delphi, watch all of the Robot in 3 Days videos, study resources that teams put out (like Simbot Seminars).

To be a Einstein level team you need to eliminate the places where luck exists and replace them with a base of knowledge and skill and a base of dedication.

[sonichammer7476]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

I think the better goal here is how to move forward to become a consistent high performing robot at the Championship not just a goal of being on Einstein. Let's face it there are many, MANY amazing robots and teams each year who don't make it to Einstein because so many little elements determine where you seed, what alliance you end up on, and who you face.

This is very true. Our team is going on our 5th year, and have made it to Worlds for the past 2 years. Last year, we ended up being ranked 18th (or somewhere close to that) in Curie, and were not selected to advance into the final rounds. To me, we earned that ranking of 18th not through luck, but through a fair amount of skill (this greatly contrasts our first Worlds appearnace, where we were not blessed with a kind schedule). Many of the Top 10 selected teams with robots that they deemed 'expendable', in the sense that they had full intentions of butchering the robot to add elements useful to them, e.g. claws for cans. Sometimes it is not a concern of skill; rather, it is the fact that you are a 'tweener', like us (not Elite yet, but well on our way there).

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by sonichammer7476

This is very true. Our team is going on our 5th year, and have made it to Worlds for the past 2 years. Last year, we ended up being ranked 18th (or somewhere close to that) in Curie, and were not selected to advance into the final rounds. To me, we earned that ranking of 18th not through luck, but through a fair amount of skill (this greatly contrasts our first Worlds appearnace, where we were not blessed with a kind schedule). Many of the Top 10 selected teams with robots that they deemed 'expendable', in the sense that they had full intentions of butchering the robot to add elements useful to them, e.g. claws for cans. Sometimes it is not a concern of skill; rather, it is the fact that you are a 'tweener', like us (not Elite yet, but well on our way there).

I point out that this year was very unusual in what mix of robots worked best on the field. The game was not well designed to use all 3 robots simultaneously in a high performing game. In fact, you could even see it in our alliance. Because we had 1671, we simply ramped back on how many stacks that our other two bots had to put up, down to 2 instead of the 3+ we had been making in the qualifying rounds. There weren't enough cans to make it worthwhile to go for more.

In previous years, the third bot could fit any number of roles. In our 2013 and 2014 alliances, our second choice could have been a first choice on lower alliances (and we were surprised that they were available at 24th pick.)

I'll point out another aspect that is key to the value of the third bot. We call it "value added"--its scoring non-teleop goals (which usually done by the first 2 bots) plus defensive ability. That's scoring in auto and the end game, plus stage points such as the assists in 2014. We always rank our 2nd picks by dropping teleop goal scoring.

The message is work to be in the top dozen and focus on performing supporting tasks that gain value to an alliance. Don't focus on trying to build for the "star attraction" of scoring the final points like goal scoring. Instead think of all of the ways to score points and think of which ways are least likely to interfere with the top alliance captains during teleop (or even auto).

[nuclearnerd]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

The message is work to be in the top dozen and focus on performing supporting tasks that gain value to an alliance. Don't focus on trying to build for the "star attraction" of scoring the final points like goal scoring. Instead think of all of the ways to score points and think of which ways are least likely to interfere with the top alliance captains during teleop (or even auto).

Good advice dor many, but Is that really helping the OP? They are asking what it takes to become an Einstein calibre team, and AFAIK, "Einstein calibre" teams get there reliably by building high-scoring robots, full stop. I guarantee 1678, 1114, 254, 148, 118 etc (to name a few) don't plan to fill a niche for someone else's alliance.

That said, it takes a lot of capacity building to get to the point where you're capable of consistently fielding robots that seed high. Unfortunately I can't offer any advice on how - we're not there yet

[Scott Kozutsky]

Originally Posted by nuclearnerd

I guarantee 1678, 1114, 254, 148, 118 etc (to name a few) don't plan to fill a niche for someone else's alliance.

I wouldn't be so sure. Just try saying that in the presence of tumbleweed, (arguably) 148s most iconic robot and the best example of a niche bot there is (that i'm aware of).

[Knufire]

Originally Posted by nuclearnerd

Good advice dor many, but Is that really helping the OP? They are asking what it takes to become an Einstein calibre team, and AFAIK, "Einstein calibre" teams get there reliably by building high-scoring robots, full stop. I guarantee 1678, 1114, 254, 148, 118 etc (to name a few) don't plan to fill a niche for someone else's alliance.

That said, it takes a lot of capacity building to get to the point where you're capable of consistently fielding robots that seed high. Unfortunately I can't offer any advice on how - we're not there yet

It's all about taking baby steps to get there. In my opinion, one of the biggest accelerators in developing on-field success is, well, on-field success. You could argue that 1678s big break was winning their division in 2013, and you can see how they've gotten much better since then.

Even if you realistically think you can compete at that level, games can still blindside you. Many, many top tier teams tried and failed to build a robot that could do everything in 2013, for example. You'd be surprised how many teams had higher hanging mechanisms that just didn't ever make it on the robot due to time or weight; it was a definite wake-up call.

On another topic, there's been a lot of talk about how, for teams that can't compete at the same level as perennial powerhouses, their best chance at going far at the championship is by building specialized support-role robots. I agree with this, but recognize that this comes with a very big assumption: the goal is to go as far as possible at the championship. Often, this robot won't be quite as successful at the regionals, depending how competitive your region is. If you were in an area where most people were only putting up a partial stack of totes, a can specialist robot wouldn't have nearly as much use as they would in California or Michigan where they would have much better robots to support.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by nuclearnerd

Good advice dor many, but Is that really helping the OP? They are asking what it takes to become an Einstein calibre team, and AFAIK, "Einstein calibre" teams get there reliably by building high-scoring robots, full stop. I guarantee 1678, 1114, 254, 148, 118 etc (to name a few) don't plan to fill a niche for someone else's alliance.

That said, it takes a lot of capacity building to get to the point where you're capable of consistently fielding robots that seed high. Unfortunately I can't offer any advice on how - we're not there yet

I think we've built niche robots in each year of 2013, 2014 and this year. In 2013, we needed a FCS to be fully effective (see 148). In 2014, we needed a goal finisher (see 1114). This year we focused on cangrabbing and were not extraordinary at stacking, just very reliable. None of our robots were extraordinary compared to, to name a few, 1717, 2056 (2013 in Curie), 1114, 971, 16 or 358, 254, 469 (2014 in Newton), 118, 1114, 254, 148, 987 (2015), and I can name several other robots that were of similar quality to ours in those years. We built our robot to fit a role in an alliance--just good enough. That's achievable by several other teams just in Northern California, and certainly other teams around the world. We started in our focus in 2012 and weren't of particular note before that. We were still working out of shipping containers in 2013.