How do you decide your strategy?

[JesseK]

We ask ourselves "What Would Karthik Do?", "What Would Beatty Do?" and "What Would Baker Do?" to every brainstorm item. This year we may add "What would 469 do and how would 254 implement it?"

Well, that's mostly true. The team does a whole host of things, including CAD drawings on the fly to answer questions that come up, playing the game with humans representing robots, and drawings on a field-backed whiteboard.

[JamesCH95]

On team 95 we try to pick a game strategy that will be fun to play, but still have a shot at being competitive.

To make most major decisions (strategy, design, and logistics) there is an open dialog between the students, mentors, and engineers with the ultimate decision resting with the engineers and mentors with the most experience in FRC. We strive to reach a consensus about each decision. Experienced mentors and engineers having the final word on big decisions helps to keep the robot effective, which I think is much more rewarding for the students. In hindsight, I am really glad some (most? ) of my ideas were never adopted. What makes this process work for our team is that the engineers carefully explain why ideas are implemented or rejected, regardless of who they come from. Knowing "why" is more important than all else, I think.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

How does your team decide on the strategy you will be using for the game? Is it something pre-determined, something that a small council or subteam makes? Something your mentors do? Or is it a whole team decision?
...

In part, I help the students ensure that they are developing a strategy and not something else.

In my parlance, a strategy answers this question, "In situation X, we will do action Y.", for all useful values of X. An example is, when to bunt.

A strategy is not a single script for what to do during the entire match. It is rules for what to decide to do moment by moment as the context around your robot/team constantly changes. no single script (or small handful of scripts) is likely to be adequate.

Blake

1. Make sure you understand the game rules, penalties, animation, and think about any possible rule change to come later on.

After that, depending on the size of your team you start making decisions. If you have a very large team, then you may just want a few representatives of each subgroup displaying their ideas. If your team is in the lower numbers, then you can have an entire group discussion.

After that, write down all your ideas, and a rough draft of the robot, and start again, this time from a different point of view. Maybe now you think of an elevator with a gripper attachment instead of a roller claw, or maybe you think of a defensive robot. This helps in brainstorming ideas that would have been thought of days later once you have established a final design.

Make sure you know any possible robot roles. You could be designing an offensive robot, a defensive robot, a herder, or anything else that fits the bill.

Once you get at least 3 good ideas written out, go over the advantages and disadvantages in each. From there, say what you think will be necessary on a good robot, and what role you will be playing. After that, take the best parts of each design that will benefit your robot, and there you go.