Karthik & 1114: Effective FIRST Strategies 2015 - Championship Conference

[Karthik]

I'm pumped for this presentation. Looking forward to talking robots and strategy, and sharing some jokes for 90 minutes with the community. I'll see all of you tomorrow! If you have any questions you want to pre ask, please post them here and I'll address them during tomorrow's presentation.

[dellagd]

Originally Posted by Karthik

I'm pumped for this presentation. Looking forward to talking robots and strategy, and sharing some jokes for 90 minutes with the community. I'll see all of you tomorrow! If you have any questions you want to pre ask, please post them here and I'll address them during tomorrow's presentation.

You may be already planning on talking about it, but how do you strategically approach selecting the 4th robot for your alliance?

Even more generally, if you could do more discussion on how to best analyze your scouting data for alliance selection once you have it, that would be awesome. Can't wait to attend the conference!

[James3245]

You may want to address the strategic dilemmas of "mid-tier" teams such as ours. Like many teams our goal is to get to championships and then be part of an alliance that advances far into elims. Our chosen strategy, and robot design, was great for champs but not so great for regional play, the result being that we never made it to champs.

We decided that a viable strategy for our team, given our decent but not exceptional resources, would be to embrace the role of can specialist. We correctly anticipated that most teams and, certainly the top tier teams, would aim to seed highest and thus spend a lot of time developing tote capabilities. Knowing that we wouldn't likely keep up with the scoring of the top couple of teams at the regionals we attend, our strategy was to complement the top teams by grabbing cans off the step and scoring them on stacks of 4 or 5. If we could grab 2, or even 3 cans, during auto we figured a top team would have to pick us. If we spent our build season trying to develop a tote stacker (like the many robot-in-3-days) we would a)not be as good as the best teams and b)not be of interest to the best teams, certainly not in St.Louis.

So we spent our whole build season developing a very fast, stout can grabber system. We knew better than try to be one of the best do-it-all robots.

But when we analyzed week 1 and 2 scores as we prepared for our Utah regional (week 3) we realized that no one would care if we got cans off the step as in week 1 and 2 the scores were so much lower than we anticipated. 3 cans were generally all that any alliance could score at that point of the season. We realized that there wouldn't be a role for our strategy at Utah. And we were largely right. At Las Vegas the cans off step really only came into play in finals and by then we had been eliminated.

Thus the dilemma of a mid-tier team hoping to do well at champs, and experienced enough to do a decent strategic analysis and also experienced enough to be realistic about resources. We were smart enough to identify a viable niche strategy that we could build and would be desirable at champs. Yet the very niche strategy that might have done well at the highest level doomed us to never getting to that level.

It is an interesting conundrum that I'm sure that many teams like ours will face again next year...