2023 ERC Recap: Castle Conquest
What is ERC?
This is now our fourth year running the East Robotics Competition (ERC), a training program meant to simulate the FRC-season and competition on a much smaller scale. The purpose of ERC is to train new and inexperienced team members in the technical and interpersonal skills needed for FRC, as well as to help build their confidence, so they can be comfortable working with the rest of the team once the build season begins. In recent years, however, we’ve also opened participation to other FRC teams as a way to help their returning members continue refining their skills or learn new ones.
At ERC kickoff, we present the game manual to every ERC team, either in-person or online through a call; then begins the season. This year, we split our new members into ERC teams of less than 10 students so we could provide each student with the chance to have more say and hands-on time on their robot. Then, over the course of the 6-week build season, our teams worked to make smaller-than-FRC-scale robots with the help of returning member mentors. This all leads up to a competition, where teams get the chance to face off in 2v2 matches, scout, and be interviewed for awards.
ERC has been greatly beneficial to us in helping prepare new members for the FRC season, both in participation and collaboration. This year especially, we’ve seen new members grow familiar not just with those on their own ERC teams, but with those across other Eastbots teams, leadership, and returning members as well.
This Year’s Season
Game
Manual and Kickoff Slideshow
The ERC game this year was called Castle Conquest. The kickoff slideshow is linked here, and the game manual here.
The winners of the 2023 East Robotics Competition were Team 3822 Neon Krakens and Team 4561 TerrorBytes! Congratulations to both teams!
Changes from Last Year
Ranking Points and Scoring Website
For ERC this year, we made some quality of life improvements and other changes to more accurately represent the FRC season. The first was that we created more ranking points, these based on game tasks, while last year’s ERC only had ranking points based on winning or losing. While no alliance ever obtained these ranking points, they showed the ability to in the playoffs, a change we plan to continue in future years. Another major thing we had this year was a scoring system. Referees were able to input match data into a website on their phones, which then output on a website we were projecting onto a screen behind the ref table, making it easier for teams to keep track of their scores and rankings.
Our Team
Continuing on last year’s tradition, our new members were split into three ERC teams: 47, 79, and 95. Each team met two to three times a week, with each meeting containing all three teams to allow for both intra-team communication and inter-team interactions and help. We also had returning members and leadership helping mentor and support our ERC teams.
Other Teams
After last year’s success with other teams, we continued expanding ERC this year, gaining participation from four other NC teams this year! Joining us were Neon Krakens (3822), a returning team, TerrorBytes (4561), Titanium Tigers (4829), and Fire Hazard (7671), and they all sent one ERC team. The continued expansion of ERC from last year, where we only had 2 other attending teams, allowed us to keep developing our social network, expose members to a wider array of ideas, and increase the level of competition, especially with the performance from these four teams.
Additionally, TerrorBytes, Titanium Tigers, and Fire Hazard all came to kickoff in-person, where we got to work with them on strategic design and concepting for their ERC robots. We visited Neon Krakens and Fire Hazard during the build season to check in and offer to help. It was a great opportunity to see other teams’ buildspace and process and both a teaching and learning moment.
We are glad to have gotten to work with all these teams this year and are tremendously appreciative of them!
The Bots
Robot Descriptions and Pictures!
Team 47 (Eastbots)
Eastbots Team 47’s primary mechanism was a rotary arm with a wheeled intake, mounted on the front of the bot opposite the driving wheels. It could intake wiffle balls both from the ground and the feeder station and score low and high. It could also theoretically score rings if aligned correctly, but that was never tested. (Robot CAD here)
Team 79 (Eastbots)
Eastbots Team 79’s main mechanism was a virtual four bar made from aluminum tubes with a 3D-printed custom intake. The robot was capable of intaking both wiffle balls and rings from the feeder station and the ground and scoring them in or on every possible scoring goal. (Robot CAD here)
Team 95 (Eastbots)
Eastbots Team 95’s robot had a wheeled intake that was made of 3d-printed plates connected by churros. Its position was fixed through the use of uprights and max spline, allowing them to intake wiffle balls from the feeder station and score high. (Robot CAD here)
Team 3822
Neon Krakens’ robot was very similar to their robot last year, they had a mechanically actuated scooper attached to a one-stage elevator
Team 4561
TerrorBytes’ robot had a custom bent sheet metal drivebase with four driven wheels. They had a custom intake similar to the 2023 Everybot intake attached to a one-stage elevator, and was one of the only two teams that demonstrated the ability to intake and score both game pieces on both levels.
Team 4829
Titanium Tigers’ robot had a custom drivebase with a horizontal intake mounted to a one-stage elevator. They could intake from the ground and score low.
Team 7671
Fire Hazard’s robot had a bucket to catch wiffle balls, hence the name ‘bucket bot’, and a pivot on which they could rotate the bucket to dump the balls and score low. They also performed defense and had an auto that worked every match.
Lessons Learned
This year, we held a retrospective meeting with our ERC teams so new members could go over what they felt went well, what didn’t go as well, what they learned, and what they wanted to improve on so they could work off their mistakes and apply the lessons ERC taught them during the FRC season. Five major takeaways our teams had were: better communication, proper time management, build simple but effective, ask for help (leadership isn’t scary), and think critically (leadership also isn’t always right).
Better Communication
Our team utilizes slack for communication, and while one of our teams has been active in their channel, posting meeting summaries, to-do lists, and availability updates, the others have been less so. Then, at a meeting, one such team made a major decision to change part of a mechanism for their robot. When members who were not present at that meeting showed up at the next meeting, they were shocked to see the change and hurt since they had both not been informed about it and not been part of the decision. This experience helped our teams realize that communication is an integral part of being on a team, and our new members plan to better communicate during the actual season.
Proper Time Management
While one team had a robot that was competition-ready by the actual competition date, having already had multiple meetings to test and troubleshoot, our other two ERC teams were scrambling to figure things out and create fixes the day of, very in-spirit of a first-week competition. Even so, they all acknowledged that there were things they could have done, decisions they could have made, which would have allowed them a more proper use of their time. They pointed out certain things they could have done in conjunction with other parts of the build process, but had waited on or not done, like motor testing, which ended up adding even more time by presenting issues they needed to troubleshoot.
Build Simple but Effective
This was a lesson that team 95 specifically was able to take away from ERC, and a motto we’ve been using for our robots. The ‘build simple but effective’ refers both to mechanisms and to what the robot can do. In 2023, our robot Hydra couldn’t score high cones and focused mainly on scoring game pieces in the middle level, giving us a simpler task that we could learn to do and do well. While they felt they were running out of time, team 95 decided to change from a rotary arm to a fixed-position arm, leading to a simpler robot that was still effective for the game.
Ask for Help
As we had many leadership members help mentor ERC teams this year and work directly with new members, they learned how to talk and interact with them, realizing ‘oh, leadership isn’t that scary.’ We believe availability and approachability leadership members presented themselves with to the teams helped them feel more comfortable asking them for help, in the process learning how to ask for help, possibly without even ever being afraid to do so in the first place for some.
Think Critically
While new members learned how to ask for help, they also learned how to think critically about the advice given, even if it’s from leadership. This was especially true with one team that accepted advice from a leadership member for part of their intake mechanism, only for it to fall through. Their reaction to it was an ‘oh, I should’ve known,’ and they acknowledged that there wasn’t anything wrong with their initial plan, that it was more sound of an idea even, they had just changed it on the advice of a leadership member. Sometimes, it’s hard to differentiate when to listen to advice and when not to.
Conclusions
ERC is a program we’re very proud of. It’s been greatly beneficial to us, this year and in the past, in helping integrate new members into our team, furthering their knowledge and skills, and developing greater confidence for all members involved, new or returning. We’re excited to be able to keep improving this activity, both for ourselves and others, and keep increasing FIRST NC participation.
Coming soon we’ll make another post about more of the organizational aspects of ERC, including how it’s planned, the legal control systems, our custom KOP drivebase, and more.
Any and all questions are welcome, thanks for reading!
This post was written by Vicky, our ERC Lead.