The Quest for Einstein

[MrJohnston]

Everybody has their opinions about what it takes to reach Einstein each year. Many teams make that their annual goal. Most don't make it. A few make it regularly. We often refer to those teams "elite." Each year we can't wait to see what sort of " robotic genius" teams like the Cheesy Poofs produce.

Two years ago, 948 made it to St. Louis for the first time ever - in its 11th year. We then had a very strong run through Archimedes, losing only one or two matches and earning an alliance captaincy. Of course, we met the Poofs in the quarter-finals and watch the rest of the event from the bleachers...We had a fantastic year and now realize we *can* compete at the highest levels. This year, our eyes are set on Einstein again... We are not "elite," but would like to develop our team so that we can annually compete at an elite level.

I know there are many teams out there much like ours. So, I'd like to pose the question:

What do folks think it takes to to annually compete at this level? What should clubs like mine do in order to accomplish this?

[wesbass23]

I have never been to Einstein myself so I cannot really speak from experience but there are a few things I think it takes to compete consistently at an elite level. The first thing is good mentors that come back every year. You need mentors who understand FIRST and who are able to devote their time each year to the team. Alongside this you need the full support of your school/community. You cannot constantly be dealing with roadblocks set by your school administration concerning things like fundraising or the number of days of school a student can miss. One of the final things is having a second robot to practice driving and work bugs out with and a place to practice driving. If the first time your students are driving the robot is at a competition, you are going to have a difficult time. Alongside this is having a drive coach or strategist who has been around FIRST for a while, a good robot will only get you so far without good strategy and playcalling. Something to remember is that a good robot looks bad with a bad driver, while a bad robot looks good with a good driver.

Obviously not all of these are necessary, there are teams who consistently do well without these things and there are teams with these advantages that do not do well.

[who716]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

What do folks think it takes to to annually compete at this level? What should clubs like mine do in order to accomplish this?

1. money- lots of money

2. engineers- lots of engineers

3. Equipment- lots of equipment

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

[Whippet]

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.

5. Time- looooots of time. Two hours a day won't even begin to cut it.

[who716]

Originally Posted by Whippet

5. Time- looooots of time. Two hours a day won't even begin to cut it.

good edition!

[dodar]

6. Corndogs - Lots of Corndogs

[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.

[Siri]

1640 has the fortune to fall into a bit of a logical loophole in your premise. We've been to Einstein twice, but we're definitely not elite in the Cheesy Poof sense. For those of you playing at home, we rubber matched them in Einstein finals last year.

This is answered in my experience as 1640 field coach in 2013 (Einstein semis) and 2014 (Einstein finals), both of which we made as second pick. It might be more approachable for some teams than what we think about as capital-E elite stories.

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.

Yes to students and time; the others are less clear. We do have enough money in the bank by build season not to worry about it constantly (far, far more than we used to). But like most things, money comes after you start winning, not before. For instance, for most of our Championship appearances, we didn't have the cash to actually get to Champs until we won/qualified at MAR...two weeks before. (At which point Sikorsky stepped up. Phew, thank you.) The most important money of than getting where you need to be is the ability to build a practice bot.

Engineers: we definitely don't have a lot of them. We have one, and he's a chemical engineer. For most of those years we did have an awesome computer scientist, and a two or three folks that could only give far (far) fewer hours, although it was especially great to have the electrical engineer and the hobbyist welder at key times. Other than that, the main engineering leaders were a plumber, a machinist, a student (me). We also had some technical day-job people on the non-engineering side, and vice versa.

Equipment: We relied pretty heavily on our student CNC mill, and students welded our chassis in-house, but other than that, it's a lot of band saws and "we're gonna need a bigger hammer". (We also like to lay up our own carbon fiber, which isn't so much an equipment thing but is really great for student interest.) The biggest 'equipment' for us is SolidWorks.

Populated Student Body / School Support: student interest is key, but the phrasing here is interesting. We don't not have a school student body. In fact, we don't have students' schools' support really at all: we're a community team operating out of a district warehouse. This makes access to students both logistically and politically difficult, and we feel the pain from it.

Time: Yes. We have 24/7 access to our build space, and it's used (by at least some people) essentially every day of build season and at only a slightly lower frequency until World Champs. The last part is really the key. With a practice bot and drive space, our "build season" tempo does not end until May.

* Basically my takeaway is that time, money, equipment, and expertise are important, but they're not more important to mid-level competitive teams than they are to the levels above them. They're not the dividing hurdles.


1640's Quest: this isn't comprehensive, but it's what I thought of this morning.
0. Build dedication and an enabling level of money/equipment/access. As mentioned, you don't need to be rich. We went to Einstein in 2013 with 3476, who built in a garage. That said, there are a lot of great teams in FIRST with wonderful, dedicated students who just are not enabled to preform like this. If you're concentrating on surviving from day to day, it's very hard to thrive.

1. Believe. Sounds crazy, right? I was on 1640 since before we realized the judges actually knew we were there. (I actually remember this realization during our fifth season.) But after we won MAR in 2012, we set our sights on Einstein 2013. Which was completely crazy. And then when we made it, and lost the semis in that heart-breaker of a scoring error, our Einstein students (through their tears) said we were coming back next year, and we were gonna do it right. 366 days later, I leaned over my drivers and told them we'd just taken Cheesy Poofs and Las Guerrillas to a rubber match in Einstein finals. You have to believe this is something you can do. There's a lot of psychology in this, all the way from summer practice to unifying your division alliance. (And keeping it there; the scoring mess really pushed our alliance to the edge in 2013, and [IMO] we weren't ready for it--see #2-3.)

2. Accrue experience. This largely leverages mentors due to student turnover. Mentors and students build the team culture though, and inspiring students for these sorts of goals is largely a peer activity. You need to understand FIRST and the many, many, many pitfalls between the end of last year's Worlds and the confetti fall on Einstein. (This is the length of your "season", not that we don't give people breaks whether or not there's confetti in their hair.)

3. Radiate professionalism. This means everything it takes to achieve levels of consistency that were unimaginable to us even with three blue banners in hand. At home, it means planning, preparation and practice. At competition, it means excellent pit processes and experience, and very, very skilled decision-making. You, particularly your coach, drivers/HP, and pit crew, also need to outwardly act this way, because people need to trust you. I say this from the point of view of a second pick who needs to actually get selected from that draft position in a field of 100. However, I can also compare the relative inexperience of our entire 2013 alliance with playing with 1114 and 1678 in 2014, and their professionalism made a huge difference. Watch them work sometime; it was really the highlight of my 2014 Einstein.

4. Be consistent, again. Think for a moment about how many robot actions you need to make to get on that final stage--even to be picked/picking for division elims. You don't have to be the best bot out there (case in point), but you should do what you do better than anyone else available among ~100 of the best robots in the world. This goes all the way back to game analysis at Kickoff. Pick the most valuable part of the game that you're capable of being the best in the world at executing, and do it. Aim for it, refine it, practice, beat it up, practice, improve it, practice, improve it, refine it, practice, and practice. Our season strategy, robot, and competition strategy all aligned to lean heavily on our swerve drive and drivers, because that was our strongest point. That said, we also push our luck, particularly with the 30-point climber in 2013: which, thanks to #0-1 Dedication and Belief (and not #2 Experience), worked basically two days out of the entire season, but it was the right two days.

5. Related to #4: get really, really, really good at something. Anything. (Okay, not anything.) This goes back to consistency. The great thing about FIRST is that there actually are 3,000 ways to win. Find yours, and leverage it. By the time we drove it on Einstein, we were sitting atop our fourth generation of swerve drive, or zillionth generation of code for it, and the best drive team in our history. Your 'thing' doesn't have to be a physical thing; ours is mostly about the iterative design and driving & pit processes that came from swerve rather than the device itself.

6. Play the game. As coach, I'm sorely tempted to put this higher. It's really the goal of half the battle: understand what captains are looking for, and give it to them. From my point of view, this is full trustworthiness and utmost professionalism, absolute consistency, great cooperation, grace under pressure, and very, very smart playing. Be the best (in their eyes) left available in the draft for that, and you've got a case. It means being part of the community, including on a personal level as coach. It means earning attention on the field, and then talk to them correctly off of it. This, like everything, takes practice and experience to hone. I include branding in this category (and also under exuding professionalism); recognition is a big player even with good scouting.

7. Related, participate in the community. At Worlds especially, the thing that gets overlooked is trust. It takes a lot of trust in someone to say their name into a microphone in front of a field of 100 teams and try to go with them all the way to Einstein--especially if they're from the other side of the country/world. We lucked out on this in 2013, getting picked by our MAR buddy where we're known for being a 'second pick wonder'. We then leveraged that Worlds-level recognition in 2014. If all goes well, you and your new friends now need to win as many matches on Saturday afternoon as you played on Thursday and Friday. For reference, winning Newton the first time did feel like winning a regional. By the time you actually get to Einstein, it's nothing like one.

[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.

[Mastonevich]

My answer is luck.

Really put the work in to do the best you can, stay positive and hope for a little luck to be added in the mix. I think those words work for FIRST and about anything else in life.