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  #151   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 20-11-2015, 19:34
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

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Originally Posted by T^2 View Post
You're advocating removing the ability to improve robots between events? Would that change make the FIRST experience reflective of an actual engineering process? I'm just an ignorant student, but I was under the impression that engineers don't usually just throw their first prototype out the door, without testing in real-world conditions, and then later decide not to make improvements when they are able to.
FIRST's build season does resemble a competitive proposal sprint, and other real-world business activities.

Using the business analogy, those that would wait until the 44th day to finish and then throw their first prototype out the door wouldn't be businesses for very long. Who said you had to use the entire build season producing one prototype that you throw out the door?

Iterate during the 44 days. During those 44 days use simulations, and other methods to predict and test performance. Use those 44 days be an engineer, or a whatever. That is more than enough time to take care of that part of the inspiration process.

OK - Now for the post-build-season part of the discussion.

At the competitions, I recommend spending as much of your time as you can, focusing outward, rather than inward. There is an excellent pay-off.

Yes, businesses, computer scientists, cooks, engineers, farmers, etc. all improve their products when they have a chance. With that in mind, if FIRST was focused on being a competition, instead of on *using* a competition, I would be making a strong case for placing maximum emphasis on the competing (the scramble to claim a banner). But it's not and I'm not. Other people have different opinions.

In my way of looking at things, there is nothing at all (well, very little *) wrong with telling teams that they will be given a challenge, that they will be given 44 days to create a solution to that challenge, and that when they go to the competitions they will be able to see how their solutions measure up against what the other teams bring.

Is it necessary to make it possible for teams involved in FRC to do everything they possibly can (outside of or inside of the 44-day window) to win a banner??? The answer is, "no." The universe does not require it. Instead it's a choice FIRST can take, or not.

Is it useful to allow for teams involved in FRC to do some iterating after 44-day window? The answer is, "maybe." There are strong arguments in favor of it, but there are also strong arguments that anything more than the the bare minimum puts the program on a slippery slope that can lead to plenty of unnecessary problems that can poison the well. Again, that's a choice FIRST can take, or not.

FIRST can say when you should put your pencil down. FIRST can say that once the pencils go down, the solutions get graded. FIRST can say that further iteration occurs in between then and the next season. FIRST doesn't have to operate that way; and they sort-of do, sort-of don't, operate that way at the moment, but they could operate that way if they cared to.

If I understand things correctly (I might not), some people I respect began the program wanting teams to spend 44 days producing their solutions, and to then test those solutions during a few high-excitement competitions. Reading between the lines, I think that those founders wanted the teams to invest time outside those 44 days in fruitful pursuits other than full-tilt (or even half-tilt) revamping, completing, etc. of their solutions. I like that model. I think it is wise.

Does that clear up my point of view for you? Mine isn't the only viable point-of-view, but I like it, and I think it's a very useful one.

Blake
* If a team shows up at a competition unable to play, sure help them put something useful onto the field (and make a note about helping them before the competition next year). That is an entirely different kettle of fish than using the withholding allowance to lug in wholesale replacement mechanisms or extensive modifications.
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Unread 20-11-2015, 20:05
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

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Originally Posted by gblake View Post
FIRST's build season does resemble a competitive proposal sprint, and other real-world business activities...
That does not mean that business today, that helped wreck a global economy, is a smart model to copy. I would like to inspire to do more than break your butt to win then often under deliver which is all too common in business today. I'd like to inspire to improve. (see below)

At the core - I ask merely for honesty. I suspect the greatest fear is if you tell perspective schools what this really is like: they will run from it because this is no simple quick commitment or fast win. This is basically 2 years before you become an 'overnight success'. That is the reality and clearly we prefer to put lipstick on it.

Added - Think about this. Today the computer on your desk is more than powerful enough to send a man to the moon. More than powerful enough to figure out the parameters of nuclear power. You have Internet so fast that only a nation state could dream of it 30 years ago. Yet our business have delivered Twitter, Facebook and first person shooters. Even today I find myself counseling students that: with a cheap Internet connection, a cheap computer from Walmart and a cheap All-In-One printer they have something that would takes years of work to gather 20 years ago. Yet people still can not find work with the barrier that low. Yes there is a problem with what we call the high bar.

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  #153   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 24-11-2015, 02:26
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery View Post
It's probably about time we had this discussion again. For reference, here are a couple previous discussions on similar topics.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=116658
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=126848
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=116789

P.S. Awesome to see Bill posting again.
IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.

Quote:
Competition Weeks Robot Access Time Proposal

Introduction

The FIRST Robotics Competition is full of many dedicated mentors and students, who try to improve on different aspects of how FRC works to inspire more students, grow more teams, create a more sustainable program and increase efficiency. Many of these passionate folks share thoughts and ideas on www.chiefdelphi.com. In a thread on “mentor burnout”,a lot of ideas and thoughts were shared on causes and possible improvements to the long standing FRC season model. The purpose of this letteris to examine a possible change that will improveFRC as a whole.

During the “mentor burnout” discussion, access to the robot was often mentioned on both sides of the burnout issue. The discussion centerson the stop-build date for therobots. Some mentors and students feel that not having a stop-build date wouldforce teams into an exhausting four month build season in order to stay competitive. They also believe that copycatting could run rampant if teams had enough time to rebuild their robot after watching others compete. Others believe that quite the opposite is true. They believe that the short six week build season and limited robot access is to blame for the herculean efforts during build season.Meanwhile practices to stay competitive outside of build season via withholding allowance, practice robots, and radical redesigns are only achievable with substantial monetary and time commitmentsmaking them possible for onlyteams with the highest levels of resources. This group thinks they could “raise the floor” of the competition by making it easier for lower resource teams to do the things higher resource teams already do.

This letteroffers a compromise of keeping the stop-build datewhile expandingunbag time in order to find a happy medium between the completely-open and the six-week-constrained competition models. The basic proposal is to allow some unbag time every week for repairs, development on both mechanical and software fronts, driver practice, and robot demonstration. This proposal is supported by many of the users on the Chief Delphi forum as a good compromise.

The proposal is broken into the following subsections:
1. Stop Build Day – No Change
2. Hands off Period – New addition
3. Unbag time – New Addition
4. Withholding allowance – GDC/FRC Discretion

Stop Build Day – No Change

- Prevents team procrastination
- Prevents complications inevitable with a major change

This proposal advocates keeping a build season of the current six week length with a firm stop built date at least one week before the first competition for several reasons. The primary driver behind this is to avoid procrastination on the robot up to the competition. We want teams to have functioning robots when they go to compete. Allowing teams to work up until the competition date will substantially increase the number of teams fieldingnon-fully functional robots. (This procrastination effect can be seen at work in many collegiate “build and compete” competitions such as Formula SAE, Mini-Baja, andSolarcar.) We also recognize that teams have learned to work within the constraints of the six week season and that people, in general, are resistant to change. Not altering the current build season prevents any unforeseen negative complications, logistical or otherwise, for both FIRST and the FRC teams.


Hands-Off Period after Stop Build Date – Add (propose one week)

- Mitigates student and mentor “burnout”
- Prevents week one teams from being at a disadvantage

This proposal advocates a mandatory hands-off-robot period of approximately one week for several reasons. The driving factor for this is preventing burnout. We recognize that the current 6 week build season asks a lot from bothstudents and mentors. Allowing a week for participants to cool down mitigates burnout while reinforcing the Stop Build Date. It also eliminates any disadvantage that teams competing in week one would otherwise be at. While some teams could get around this one week hiatus with a practice robot, the overall need for a practice robot will be greatly reduced by the additional time teams will have to work with in the following weeks.


Unbag Time for each week following “hands-off” week (propose 8 hours/week)

This proposal advocates using theRobot Access Period already in place for district teams to across all of FRC. While non-district teams have a practice day at their competition,unbag time has some distinct advantages which make it preferable over a practice day. In nearly every case, it is more efficient for teams to update and test their robot in their own shop where they have access to all of their tools and don’t have to wait in lines to use a practice field for five minutes at a time. This extra time before the competition allows teams to be more prepared coming into the event resulting in a faster inspection process, shorter lines for the practice field, and potentially more matches as extra time opens up that was previously reserved for practice and inspection. From a learning perspective these unbag windows complement the six-week build season in teaching time management as students plan out how they want to use their 8 hours in one-hour increment. From a publicity standpoint, with 8 hours of unbagtime, teams can now demo their robots during the competition season furthering FIRST’s goal of “making it loud”.

While district competitions already have unbag time implemented for weeks on which a team is competing, this proposal advocates expanding un-bagging to every week. The reason for this is simple; we want to give teams as much opportunity as possible to succeed. A 2012 survey conducted by FRC team 33 at the World Championship shows that the vast majority of the top 100 (OPR) teams at the event had some sort of practice robot or practice system. What the survey effectively shows is that the very successful teams have already implemented an artificial unbag window when they improve and drive a second practice robot they built in addition to their competition robot. While it is unrealistic to ever expect lower resource teams to build a practice robot, we can mitigate the need for one by expanding access to the competition robot, allowing teams to take the robot they finished on Stop Build day and improve it to make it the best it can be.

It is important to stress that the intention behind the iteration phase is for teams to improve their robots – not build new ones. Controlling the amount of access time will allow FIRST to directly limit how easy it is for copycats and clean sheet re-design to occur. We expect many teams might copy an element or reverse engineer a part of another team’s robot. However,teams actually enjoy this sharing and semi-open source nature to the competition and feel that it is an important part of iteration and continuous improvement.

This addition will not only improve FRC, but will mitigate mentor burnout in addition to adding an important iteration phaseto the FRC engineering process. The overall idea is pretty simple: allow for unbag time over the course of the competition season.

Here is a summary of the benefits for this element:

• Drastically reduce the need to build a practice robot, save time, money and reduce stress.
• Some teams that used to build a practice robot can now meet less hours per week and still be able to finish the competition robot. Reduce burnout.
• Middle tier teams that did not build practice robots before will be more competitive and the gap will be narrowed between the top and middle tiered teams.
• Teams that can only afford to attend one event will have the same amount of access to their robot comparing to teams that attend multiple events prior to the competition.
• Veteran teams can now help the rookie and bottom tier teams since they have access to their robot during the 8 hours each week. This will raise the bottom and narrow the gap and make the event more competitive and exciting to watch.
• Allow pre-inspection to take place by volunteers* (piloted at MEZ during unbag time window before week 3 Detroit event this year).
• Allow real world development phase, students more inspired by learning from improving their robots.
• Allow robots to reach their full potential.
• Do in-season sponsor/advertising/media (making it loud) visits without requesting special waivers/approvals.
• More in-season scrimmages can be held to benefit all and not just teams with practice robots.
• Additional run time on competition robot allows for some level of durability testing which results in improvingthe reliability of robots at competitions.

*The pre-inspection event at the MEZ this year was not an official inspection, but a review with teams during their unbag time for repairs that would be difficult to do at an FRC event. These repairs included frame perimeter violations, bumper issues, wrong wire sizes, and general pneumatics compliance issues. In 2012, only 30/40 teams were ready to compete when matches started. In 2013, 36/40 were through inspection, and an additional 2 made it through inspection before their first match. The two that were not through were likely by choice of the team (a no-show, and a team that would not accept help). With more weeks available of un-bag time, more “pre-inspection” events could be established to help with the major issues being caught before teams make it to their events.


Withholding Allowance – Keep and modify by FIRST each year as needed

This area can largely be left to the discretion of the GDC based on how much they want teams to change their robots over the course of the season. Current weights have been large enough to do major system redesign efforts or make repairs to a frame. Some teams have relied on it in order to make a pseudo-practice bot utilizing easily removable parts of the competition robot.


Keep Season Short as Option

There will be teams that do not like changes and want to keep everything the way it is. There are also teams who want to work 6 weeks and stop but also want everybody else to stop for fear of being at a disadvantage. This proposal can allow teams that option. All they have to do is go to a week 1 or week 2 event and they will be on an even playing field with other teams.


Implementation

Since there will be a lot more bag lock and unlock to keep track of, we propose to modify the Robot Lockup form. One example is attached (designed by the coach of Team 1640 who is also a robot inspector at events). We want to make it easier for robot inspectors to check the hours. Instead of checking if teams exceeded 8 hours each week, all the robot inspectors need to check is the total number of opened hoursprior to the competition. What it means is 8 hours per week on average. For example, if a team attends a Week 4 event, they can have up to 32 hours of access time. For a team that attends a Week 2 event, they can have up to 16 hours of access time. They can use all 16 hours in the first week and 0 hours in the second week. This makes it fairer for teams that have to crate and ship their robot, and make it more flexible for other teams with limited access to their shop.


Summary

By allowing for additional unbag time over the competition season, FRC can benefit from creating a development/iteration window that currently only exists for teams building practice robots or competing at many events within the district system. This development time increases teams’ competitiveness and improves their overall likelihood of having a successful season. By keeping the traditional six weeks and Stop Build day, FRC will keep procrastination to a minimum and continue to exhibit real-world deadlines. We think that this proposal is a win-win for teams and FRC as a whole and we sincerely hope that you will support it.


Warm Regards,

Isaac Rife (Team 33 mentor, BAE Systems Engineer)
Ed Law (Team 2834 coach, Chrysler Engineer), Kristen Law (Team 2834 team captain, 2013 Dean's List Winner)
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  #154   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 24-11-2015, 02:42
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

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Originally Posted by Ed Law View Post
IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.
+1 for this. this is my favorite so far. Seems like a fair compromise. It would make more teams more competitive and therefore more inspirational.
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  #155   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 24-11-2015, 07:33
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

I once read a postulation about procrastination, that it happens due to the psychology behind perceived energy it takes for a person to think through and do something. As someone becomes more adept at something, procrastination is much less likely since the perceived energy is much less lower. Examples are chopping veggies or getting a technical person to write a paragraph for a FRC award. That concept - energy to think through something - is something I face daily as a software engineer. Some days I only do 8 hours (compared to my wife's 10+) but I am mentally exhausted after those 8 if I've been working on brand new concepts.

I think that burnout is much less of an issue as the veteran status of teams becomes more prevalent. As we get better at competition and better at training 'the next generation', the energy we spend coming up with new concepts is far less than it used to be. As designs for things like gearboxes and drive trains converge, we focus the creative energy on the game challenges rather than finagling the fundamentals. So I think FRC's culture is more aligned with removal of the stop-bag day than it ever has been before.

However, I think we'd need a formal poll sent to all teams.

On the plus side, there wouldn't be so much conflict over who to spend Valentine's Day with. I'm sure that applies to other situations that are inevitable for individuals in the first 3 months of the year.
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  #156   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 25-11-2015, 10:45
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

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Originally Posted by Ed Law View Post
IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.
FIRST did ask for the survey data I took. We tried to interview someone knowledgeable about the team for the top 25 OPRs in each division that year. I don't know if I told teams I would publicly share their data or not, so I would rather not publish the table, but we asked a handful of questions. One was: "Do you have some sort of Practice Robot?" The four divisions came in between 75% and 88% of teams from those top 25 (some divisions we only got to 20 of the 25 teams). We then asked teams to assign an estimated "percentage" that the practice was similar to the competition robot. This varied from 10% (usually a modified version of the previous year and only used for driving practice) to 100% (only 1 team claimed that). The average came in around 60% (averaging a number given to a subjective value is.... well another number...) with the usual Einstein suspects coming in between 90-99% IE very very similar. This was a fun discussion to have, and a couple teams were oddly specific (I got a 97%, a 98%, and a 95.2% from three teams I have a lot of respect for).

This survey fostered the idea as I was surprised that a couple of really good teams actually stopped build practice bots because they typically had access to 3 districts (and 3 x 6 hrs. un-bag) plus a district championship to gain experience. I am not sure that they were top 1% teams, but they were within that top 4%. 6 hrs. of unbag split into 3 x 2 hr. sessions is a decent amount of access for practice, test, and tune. I know a lot of really great teams spend way more than that, but it truly is a nice chunk of time for a team. If teams had similar chunks each week, they could do some pretty impressive stuff.

**********************************************
I really pushed for this as I think FIRST misses out on the inspiration of product development/improvement. Watching the documentary on Slingshot, and all the iterations they went through, I was reminded of how little refinement we get to do.
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Unread 25-11-2015, 12:31
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

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Originally Posted by IKE View Post
.. We then asked teams to assign an estimated "percentage" that the practice was similar to the competition robot. This varied from 10% (usually a modified version of the previous year and only used for driving practice) to 100% (only 1 team claimed that). The average came in around 60% (averaging a number given to a subjective value is.... well another number...) with the usual Einstein suspects coming in between 90-99% IE very very similar. This was a fun discussion to have, and a couple teams were oddly specific..
Curious - I would have considered "Woody," our prototype robot in 2014 to be around 60% similar to "Buzz" even though they were built of different materials, because Buzz was built in aluminum to the dimensions worked out in lumber on Woody, and all of the functional points were implemented similarly. Our 2015 practice robot was north of 95%, only decorative and completely inconsequential differences like abandoned mounting holes. Anyway, was 60% the mean value? What were the median (50th percentile) and mode (commonest answers)? I suspect that this did not look at all like a normal distribution, even among teams with similar OPRs. It would be lovely if you could post a histogram.
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Unread 25-11-2015, 13:02
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

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Originally Posted by IKE View Post
This survey fostered the idea as I was surprised that a couple of really good teams actually stopped build practice bots because they typically had access to 3 districts (and 3 x 6 hrs. un-bag) plus a district championship to gain experience. I am not sure that they were top 1% teams, but they were within that top 4%. 6 hrs. of unbag split into 3 x 2 hr. sessions is a decent amount of access for practice, test, and tune. I know a lot of really great teams spend way more than that, but it truly is a nice chunk of time for a team. If teams had similar chunks each week, they could do some pretty impressive stuff.
I remember answering your survey questions about this- and we are one of those teams you are describing who stopped building full scale practice robots. The past few years we've been playing 4 times before DCMP, and then getting DCMP before heading to CMP. It was actually becoming more work to maintain the practice bot as we swapped 'end effectors' and subsystems back and forth.

We will usually have several 'test bucks' for software or specific mechanism design, but a vast majority of our practice is done on the competition robot before ship, during unbag windows and through practice matches at competitions. We really emphasize being ready to go out of the bag so we can cycle the practice field many times and tune and tweak.

Would I prefer to have a practice bot? Yes definitely. However, it does take a considerable amount of effort for our team as we do all of our own fabrication. It's been working for us thus far, and we're continuing to refine our process!

-Brando
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Unread 25-11-2015, 13:53
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Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season

Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo View Post
Curious - I would have considered "Woody," our prototype robot in 2014 to be around 60% similar to "Buzz" even though they were built of different materials, because Buzz was built in aluminum to the dimensions worked out in lumber on Woody, and all of the functional points were implemented similarly. Our 2015 practice robot was north of 95%, only decorative and completely inconsequential differences like abandoned mounting holes. Anyway, was 60% the mean value? What were the median (50th percentile) and mode (commonest answers)? I suspect that this did not look at all like a normal distribution, even among teams with similar OPRs. It would be lovely if you could post a histogram.
Median varied between 0.7 and 0.9 depending on the division. Mode was 0.95 for all divisions. 95% usually meant functionally equivalent with all major systems and close enough to do code development, but possibly different enough that some tuning may be required.

Yes 125 answered back in 2012 with a Practice bot that was 40% representative. I don't have my field notes to know what that meant for that team for that year*, but usually that was similar drive train, or something to hook the shooter up to while tuning.

I also had helpers doing some of the interviews, so it may not have been me doing that particular interview.
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