As I sit here patiently waiting to see a follow up to the stop build day survey results, I can’t help but ponder what a typical build season strategy in a post-bag world of FRC would look like.
Reading Jim Zondag’s paper “Stop the Stop Build”](https://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/3284?), there seems to be at least two hypothetical worlds we may be heading to after “Bag and Tag” is changed.
The first might very well follow Jims’ suggestion of an “8 hour weekly window” to work on the robot, hold scrimmages, etc.
The second might be a full blown popping of the bag, in which teams have all the time in the world from Kickoff until the end of Worlds to work on their robot(s).
In either of these scenarios, it seems to me that there would be a fundamental shift in the build strategy that teams employ.
Would the days of rapid prototyping and “material wasting” iterative processes be bygones of the past, or would they be knocked down a notch as teams wait to examine the successes of others?
Would CAD teams be drinking less coffee in the first week of build season due to not having to merge parts into broken assemblies from new constraints that the prototyping team gives?
Would there be a reason to build 2 robots if there is unlimited driver practice/programming time?
To those who have spent more time in this program than myself, I ask you, what do you envision the future of an FRC Build Season to look like in this new era?
If a total “bag removal, no strings attached” deal were put in place (which I’d much prefer), I think we’d initially see three separate paths teams will take, and over time they’d all converge.
The first path will be the high resource, high competitiveness teams, who will just continue on a build season schedule throughout the extended amount of time. They will still make a practice robot but use the separate robot for programming and extra driver practice while the main robot is continually used for drive practice. This will temporarily push the competitive floor higher with the short burst of “do it all better than everyone else with all the time in the world” energy until the model collapses. Such a path will be increasingly unsustainable to the point where teams that push themselves too hard may fall apart should they not slow down. After a while the natural ceiling of the competition (provided it stays the way it is now) will begin to buffer the marginal benefits of working a continuous build season and teams will stop having strong incentives to continue such a path, provided the intensity doesn’t weed them out of it earlier.
The second path will be the newer teams who don’t already have the 6(+) week momentum under their belts, who will use all of the time they have to make a singular robot in the same way these teams now use all 6 weeks, just stretched out. This path is nowhere near as dangerous as the first, but while it is more sustainable, it too will begin to change and speed up as teams realize they can do more in the time given to them if they put a bit more effort in.
The third path will likely be the path a majority of existing teams take, and it is what I believe the former two paths will converge upon with time. Teams that take the third path will likely plan their build season at a schedule pretty similar to the 6 week schedule (albeit slightly slower), and use the extra time for iteration, debugging, and practice. These teams will make a single robot and as a result of the middle ground solution will likely be less stressed, tired, and overworked than people are during the six-week build season and will probably have more refined machines by the time they get to the competition.
Of course when everything converges to the third path, there will be varying degrees of execution (some teams will still make two robots, some will still take all the time they’re given to make one), but most teams will be a lot more normalized about the median. Overall there are some short-term dangers (such as unchecked extremism in path 1), but I think with proper planning and careful execution, fully eliminating the bag day can result in a better program for all people involved.
Wise teams will set a deadline that is NOT their first event to finish the robot.
What will likely end up happening is that the number of second robots drops, as teams build what they need to on one, and drive the wheels off, and repair, until competition. This will free up funding for those teams to use elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the number of teams building on practice day will skyrocket for a season or two…
Starts with the first line of that post. Wise teams won’t plan to finish shortly before the event, they’ll be aiming 2-3 weeks before that.
The problem, as any inspector who’s been around long enough can tell you, is that a fairly large number of teams either don’t make that sort of plan in the first place, or don’t manage to stick to it. The nearly-inevitable result is that they’re scrambling to put something together in the pits on practice day, and by the end of practice day end up with at least one inspector in their pit at all times while they try to finish.
With 6 weeks, you can plan for what you can do and have a reasonable chance of hitting that mark. But what if you have 8, 9, 10 weeks? Sounds like a lot of time, doesn’t it? WRONG. Many teams will make that mistake, try something more complicated, realize that it’s not what they needed, go to something more simple, watch Week 1 matches, realize that of course they actually did need that complicated device and can make it work… and two weeks later still be finishing it up right about the time their friendly yellow hat drops by to inform them that he plans to stick around and pass what he can as it’s completed (typically this is around 7 PM as by then enough teams have passed to allow 1:1 inspector:team ratios).
For the first couple of years, teams won’t figure out that that “extra time” isn’t really going to help them get more done. Once they figure that out, they’ll be more prepared and not be building as much at the events. But until they do, they’ll be busy on practice days. (No, you can’t work on the robot at your shop!)
I can’t really speak for other teams, but 1836 would likely continue to build 2 robots, using the competing robot for primarily code and drive practice while the practice bot is constantly being iterated on. For the most part, removal of bag day on 1836 would simply allow for more iteration of new/improved mechanisms, as the practice robot would not be dedicated to constant practice/code.
It’s a really interesting thing to think about, and I think the removal of stop build will help raise the bar for lower tier teams to spend more time ironing out kinks or building their bots, while also making life easier and less expensive for top tier teams, enabling more teams to join that pool. Overall, the elimination of stop build day would generally (here’s a disclaimer about different teams doing different stuff) reduce burnout, costs of rush shipping, costs of building multiple robots, and raise the bar of competition from the lowest to highest levels of play.
I’ve pondered a similar question before. What would FRC look like if build season was twice as long?
My conclusion was that robot uniqueness would decrease across FRC as a whole and that the gap between high end and average teams would increase, at least in the short term.
Robot uniqueness would decrease across FRC as a whole. One of the coolest aspects of FRC when compared to other design competitions, in my opinion, is the wide variety of unique solutions teams come up with each year. There are typically a few robot designs that are more common than others, but in general the spread is pretty large. I think the main reasons for why this occurs is the limited amount of build time and the restrictions on changing the robot after competitions start. These two things limit the amount of iteration allowed to take place. If bag and tag were to stop altogether robots would converge on the few successful designs that appear through out the 6 weeks of competition at an even faster rate than they already do, thus decreasing the number of unique robot designs. This dynamic can be observed in other design competitions, for example the VEX Robotics Competition. The VEX season is year round and the system used enables extremely fast iteration. This results in just a couple robot designs being used by the vast majority of teams by the time VEX Worlds rolls around. This is an extreme example, if bag and tag were removed this wouldn’t happen to the quite the same degree in FRC, mostly because of the time still being limited and the greater complexity of FRC systems.
The competitive gap between high end and average team would increase, at least in the short term. An important part of this theoretical change to FRC is that veteran teams have already figured out the best way to use the time available to them and follow a proven season timeline from year to year. In other words, the best way to do FRC has been discovered through iteration by experienced teams and so a sudden change to the very nature of the competition would take time to adjust to. During this adjustment period most teams will make slight adjustments to their season timelines, while top teams will be faster to take full advantage of this change. They would likely do this by following the same build season timeline they normally do, but when competition season starts they would identity the optimal robot design(s) just like everyone else, but unlike everyone else they would have the resources to implement these changes to their robots to the extent that they could create an entirely new robot. This ability to iterate faster is what sets teams apart and removing bag and tag would only give more time for the faster iteration rate of top teams to result in a greater competitive gap between top and average teams.
This is my theory as to what would happen if there was suddenly more time to iterate. The conclusions I came to have both good and bad sides to them depending on your point of view. A reduction in design uniqueness or an increase in the number of iterative design processes. An increase in the competitive gap or higher elevated role models to strive to be like. But with that being said I don’t think bag and tag should stay exactly as it is now, I’d like to see a bag and tag rules loosen to some degree.
On the other hand, I expect the population to spread farther. Teams with minimal (human energy and/or money) resources would come in just as they have been. Teams with lots of energy and a bit of discipline but not quite enough money to build a second robot would improve significantly, and teams with the resources to make two or more robots will free up additional resources for even more improvement as the development can become more serial than alternative. However, at the powerhouse end, teams would effectively have an infinite withholding allowance - they could literally walk in to successive events with completely different robots. The meta game would be even more varied from week 1 to CMPs.
Edit/Add: Strategies would be similar to strategies today, just with different parameters. Iteration would continue much as it has, but low resource teams will have more weeks to do it, and mid-high resource teams would not be limited to stuff which can be swapped out or rebuilt on Thursday from 30# of withholding + COTS after 6 weeks.
I honestly doubt this. I think the top teams would do about the same things they have been doing, just with less effort and burnout. If teams feel the need to go to different events with completely new robots, they already do that. The rules don’t really constrain that process meaningfully - they just require more work / effort / cost to follow. If teams need to redo entire subsystems, that is already done. I don’t think the bag stops any top team from making these sorts of changes - if anything does, it’s the workload and resource consumption.
I think less would change than people expect - robots would perform slightly better, teams would spend thousands less dollars a year on development, maybe half the teams with practice robots now would stop doing that, and iteration would be a little more common. The sky won’t fall.
I agree with most of this, but I think that teams who build 2 robots will use their comp bot for the programmers and the practice robot for driver practice. I can say with absolute certainty that Wave’s practice robot has been better than our comp bot every year I’ve been on the team and the biggest reason for that is that the programmers have more time to fine tune it. As much as we strive to make both robots identical they never are and all those fine touch programming tweaks take time that we don’t get as much of with the comp bot.
I pretty much disagree with everything you have said. The floor will rise getting rid of B&T. I’ve never heard a team go “Man i wish we had less time with our robot, because we would have been better!” The more time you get to use something the better results you will have. I’ve never seen anybody pick up a musical instrument and the next day sell out a concert at MSG, practice is critical.
FRC is not FTC or Vex where drastically changing your robot is easy or cheap. Robot design will not converge losing B&T because it hasn’t happened now. Teams could wait to build the bulk of their robot until after the 1st couple weeks of comp to see what other teams are doing but they don’t and just because team will have unlimited access to their robot getting rid of B&T doesn’t mean they will start. Building a robot is hard enough already trying to squeeze that in to an even shorter time frame to try and copy from afar another teams robot is near impossible, and will be a waste of time and money as you will have not learned why each aspect works the way it does because you didn’t prototype or test before building it. You just went in with blind faith that because the Poofs made it you can too.
I actually think the opposite will happen. The first few seasons, everyone will be aware of the change in build time and I think the majority of teams will at least attempt to keep the same 6 week goal. However, after a few seasons, the rookie teams and some other teams with large turnover will have no knowledge of the former 6 week build season. They will see 9 week build season (or however much time they have) and they won’t think twice about using the whole time to build their robot because to a newcomer, 9 weeks seems insanely fast to build a robot.
I think the use of week 0 events could help keep teams to a schedule, assuming all those events actually stay on week 0. Teams would push to be done for that event so they could get some meaningful practice before redesigning what needs to change. The problem could be those events moving. If your local regional is in week 6, why not move that practice event from week 0 to week 4 or 5? I would be very interested to see what happens with week 0 if we removed stop build day.
1000 posts… wow. I used to look at all the people with 1000+ posts and think they were insane… now I know they are.
I think dropping Bag and Tag would have some interesting effects on the competitive disparity between District teams and Regional teams. As it stands, District teams have an obvious advantage over Regional teams by the time champs comes around given the number of plays they’ve had, and the amount of time they’ve had to work on their robot.
Ditching the bag would allow teams that compete at fewer events to close the gap in terms of driver skill. There’s nothing like real stick time in real matches, but certainly giving teams more time to play with and improve their robot would help to improve Regional teams relative to District teams.
I also like the idea that FRC as a competition would become more heavily based on iteration than it is now. I would say improving an existing design is more prevalent in today’s engineering world than creating new products and ideas.
I don’t think Bag and Tag will end because the selling point of “These kids build this whole robot in just 6 weeks!” is just too well liked by FIRST leadership. The statement is obviously not true for most teams, but getting rid of Bag and Tag would make it a completely disingenuous pitch.
Agree 100%. Given the rate at which FIRST recycles game challenges (or creates those involving similar mechanisms to those in the past), veteran teams spend less and less time brainstorming for and designing prototypes, and instead have the time to focus on adjusting and perfecting components from previous years for that year’s challenge. For example, the next time a game challenge involves picking up a tough-to-manipulate object and placing it elsewhere, new teams will be struggling to come up with fresh ideas, while older teams are refining their 2005, 2007, or 2011 mechanism for the new challenge. Having been involved in FRC for 10 years but actually participating on a fairly young team, I can understand the frustrations many younger teams have with their disadvantages (from a design perspective).
With no B&T, will there not be an effort to get your district/regional later in the schedule? Teams not in a district might try to get into a later regional to have more iteration and practice time? Earlier events might be depleted of good teams/robots?
Or will this go through a cycle where teams expect the competitive robots to be in later regionals/districts so they go to early ones to improve their odds?
It seems like this would introduce a whole new level of strategy. I am tired already.
Our team builds a field and runs a practice Rally the Sunday before bag day for any team wanting to participate. No B&T would allow us to do this multiple times, even informally allowing teams to practice together. This would help tremendously with teams in our area who lack the resources to have effective driver practice and/or need some help with the robot. So this could help teams that struggle from a financial/resource point of view.
Lastly, I honestly don’t know if this change would help my team’s worst robot design problem - making decisions and sticking with them to build the robot so there is time for code and practice, and iterate only after code and practice.
Says the guy that cloned 254’s robot to make IRI eliminations in 2013
I think there are enough examples of teams re-designing robots (67’s world championship robot in 2009) or subsystems (gear floor intakes this season) in the current system, that design convergence should be at least considered in removing bag and tag.
Aside from distance/cost of travel, many teams already try to go to events as late as possible for multiple reasons. Fields and rules are notoriously known to sometimes be bad/incomplete week 1, as well as wanting more time with a practice bot and withholding allowance.
If VEX, FTC, VEX IQ and FLL don’t need bag and tag, FRC probably doesn’t either.
I think most teams don’t realize how much of a disadvantage they are at, both educationally and competitively, because of the bag and tag restrictions.
