2015 Lessons Learned: The Positive

[Jared Russell]

• 8 alliance Einstein was awesome.
• It was cool to see some very effective robots from outside of North America throughout the event and on Einstein.
• The game presented some interesting technical challenges during design and build.
• Great diversity in robot design this year owing to liberal sizing rules.
• The rules were for the most part very well written and there were few ambiguities compared to other recent seasons.
• The conference portion of the Championship event had some really interesting talks and I think many teams found it useful.
• Using Qualifying Average as the first order sort seemed to work well at seeding teams according to their ability, as long as the number of matches was sufficient.
• Despite the number of teams and general level of crowding, the volunteer staff was able to adjust on the fly to fix traffic jams and chokepoints, and helped to cope with the scale of the event over the course of the weekend.

[Koko Ed]

I Love! LOVE! LOOOOVE! having 8 divisions and eight alliances on Einstein! It was so much fun and so exciting. I wish FIRST would do this forever!

This year may not have had the best game but these were some of the coolest robots I have ever seen produced!

Volunteer food was awesome at most of the events I attended.

I have nothing but total love for my fellow volunteers. There is no one else I would willful permanently damage my body through will self imposed torture than every single one of you! I miss all of you guys already and I can't wait to see you in the off season!

[mrgoldtech]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

I Love! LOVE! LOOOOVE! having 8 divisions and eight alliances on Einstein! It was so much fun and so exciting. I wish FIRST would do this forever!

I also love the new fields! I especially love the scientists they chose to honor, such as Grace Hopper and Nikola Tesla!

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

I Love! LOVE! LOOOOVE! having 8 divisions and eight alliances on Einstein!

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

It was so much fun and so exciting. I wish FIRST would do this forever!

I think the shock to the system in terms of robot design paradigms was a net positive. I like that we're now being kept on our toes the next couple of years in this department. There were elements of the game this year that are worthy of being placed into the melting pot of FRC game design, whether or not a full concept similar to Recycle Rush should ever see the light of day again (Magic 8-Ball says: No, pls)

Growth of the district model is also a good thing. Like with robot design, game design, or team building, it will still come down to execution.

Personally on 422 we removed a lot of negative influences that caused some short term negative effects on performance but will enable us to be a stronger organization in the long term. We didn't play as well as we did last year but everyone finished the season with higher spirits and with stronger determination than last year, and that outweighs the negatives out of my control.

[dudefise]

The new rules allowed a lot of new and unique designs, some totally out-of-the-box.

Teams could focus on precision rather than brute force, leading to more elegant designs and driving.

Using average scores in Qualifying helped make seeding more accurate (though I disagree with its use in Elim, also defense would make this difficult)

Wildcard rules good for many teams attending events with several "powerhouses", allows more good but not quite dominant teams to make WC.

[Qbot2640]

The later start for practice matches at Regionals made Thursday a much more effective day - you could actually make the changes or fine-tunings you needed to, without worrying about missing practice matches.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Qbot2640

The later start for practice matches at Regionals made Thursday a much more effective day - you could actually make the changes or fine-tunings you needed to, without worrying about missing practice matches.

And from an inspection/ref standpoint, we actually had TIME to get people to their matches, get any briefing/training out of the way, and more to the point, there were an awful lot of robots out there with colorful stickers in the first or second match... that stayed for the third or fourth... You get the picture.

[Rachel Lim]

- Seeing the amazing designs that came out of the relaxed rules. I will never forget my awe that night when I first saw 148 reveal of Batman and Robin, or the days that we watched webcasts of GTRC and saw 1114, or seeing the matches that 254 played at SVR. I'm not sure if it came from this being my first year really paying attention to the game, or if the gap truly was larger this year, but I loved seeing what some teams came up with.

- Getting proof that drivetrains really are about implementation, not specific type. (And that WCD can win any game.) We did mecanum this year, and although it was interesting, it's not one I'm particularly interested in repeating...

- Less confusing fouls. They still happened, and there were still some I don't understand (like yellow totes falling over the step), but overall it was an improvement from last year.

- The removal of bumper rules. Numbering wasn't always great, but it was usually easier to read than looking at bumpers last year. Plus then we didn't have to find someone willing to make them.

- New wildcard rules.

- The emphasis on practice. Consistency of stacking, manipulation of the chute door, dealing with noodles (both driving over and throwing), and other things made driver practice really, really important (not saying it usually isn't, but consistency this year was really key). It's a lesson I hope we learned.

---

These are the things I'm either still divided over, or unsure whether they're really "positive" experiences, but I wanted to mention:

- Less dependence on alliance partners to seed high or do well in general. Perhaps way too little.

- QA ranking. On the one hand, I did find it more fair and a better way to identify the top teams than WLT. On the other, it made me feel like we were constantly competing against everyone, and that if others messed up it was a chance for us to seed higher.

- 8 divisions at champs. It was really cool, and we were able to watch two fields at once, but it also made it seems like which division teams ended up in played an even larger role. Anything is better than split champs though.

- Having it to compare to Aerial Assist. I started FRC in 2014, and even though I've read of the other ones, these are the two I know well. It'll be interesting to see what I think next year after having these two extreme games.

[Jardanium]

I really liked the idea of the "engineering challenge" that Recycle Rush created. Totes and Recycling Containers were difficult to manipulate, (as our team soon found out) and seeing the creative solutions people came up with at the Week 1 event I attended was great.

[Hjelstrom]

In the final analysis, maybe I'm in the minority, but I really liked this game a lot.

- Loved the engineering challenge, we literally had to brainstorm for 2-3 times as long as we normally do before we started prototyping.
- We had so many functions to build into our robot that many different groups of students designed their own mechanisms that were integrated into the robot.
- The split field meant very few difficult judgment calls for the refs.
- I like no defense because it means we can try out cool new drivetrains! Now we've had a 3-wheel kiwi drive on Einstein!
- I think the game designers balanced the can race vs the auto points and stack values very well. Even on Einstein, it wasn't *just* the fastest can grabbers that won, they had to put up big points too. We had a 250+ in match with only four cans for example.
- 8 teams on Einstein was really cool
- Average match score was excellent for ranking
- Excellent implementation of co-opertition!
- On Einstein we got to watch the matches without long speeches in between!

[AcesPease]

Originally Posted by Hjelstrom

In the final analysis, maybe I'm in the minority, but I really liked this game a lot.


- Average match score was excellent for ranking
- Excellent implementation of co-opertition!

I also liked the ranking system, and especially enjoyed the opportunities for robot cooperation. If the cooperative ways to score in auto had been more valuable we might have seen some very amazing things. At our district event We were getting 12 points in auto by getting all three robots to move a can (one from the step), it was a pretty cool thing to watch. Cooler, I think than seeing one robot grab all the objects. If there were extra points for having multiple robots involved we might have seen some amazing combinations of robots getting three cans and three totes in auto at champs. Something for the game designers to think about.

[Taylor]

This game provided the best autonomous modes ever. 2826 and 4613 were awe-inspiring. StepWars were exciting.

RR struck a nice balance between teams that could dominate a game with the need for good alliance partners, strategy, and communication.

RR was a great game for the district model. Our robot logged nearly 60 matches - three times that of most other years - and still is going strong into the offseason.

The Innovation Faire was really cool, especially for families.

[ASmith1675]

1. Because of the open sizing rules and lack of robot-to-robot interaction it opened up a massive space for unique and very different robot designs. Tether bots (not the ramps -- the electrical kind), conveyor bots, and robots that were basically stack manufacturing facilities all stretched the limits of design. Which was very nice to see.

2. 8 division Einstein. This was awesome to see, even without being at the event. Being able to see all the robots that would normally have been in the division finals on the big stage was really great, and gave a lot of team some exposure that they may not have normally had.

3. QA ranking system (for qualifying rounds only). I'm going to list this as a positive because I believe it worked very well in this game. (Though I am not convinced it would work well for all games). The rankings at the end of qualifications felt more or less correct for a given event.

4. New control system and components. Our team had what felt like a very smooth transition from the cRIO to the RoboRIO, and had FAR fewer problems with the new system. In addition, the new motor controllers were a welcome upgrade. We used the Victor SPs and (as far as I know) did not have a failure all year.

[Oblarg]

The new control system rocks. I cannot stress this enough. This was the first time in my 8 years of FRC that my team has fielded a robot without a single major controls problem during competition. The new motor controllers are absolutely fantastic; we didn't have a single problem with our Talon SRX's, and the integrated signal wires are a godsend (even using them in PWM mode, being able to easily daisy-chain motor controllers on the same side of the drive train saved us a lot of wiring effort and mess). Just about everything is a huge upgrade from what it was before.

[Jared Russell]

Ditto the new control system. A huge improvement over cRIO, and I'm sure it will only get better (nits were delays in establishing DS<->Robot communications, and some minutiae in the new Java WPIlib).