Constructive Feedback for Roebling Scouting

Competition Championship Event
1

Hi all,
Mentor for Team 4276 here (Surf City Vikings). I am looking to those heavily involved in scouting in the Roebling division that can provide some constructive feedback on ways to improve our chances at alliance selection, in the hopes to engage in a helpful dialog when considering design decisions in future years.

After starting off strong (7-0 in matches, 4-rotor in four of those matches) and playing a significant role in the success of our qualification alliances (ranked as high as #2), we trailed off a bit on Friday afternoon after a few very close matches (but with the robot continuing to perform nominally) and ended quals Ranked #16. We asked our own team to scout us the same way they’d scout an opponent and felt confident in our ability to do well in elims.
Boy were we surprised when we weren’t picked – not even as a backup team. Several other teams reviewing our performance were equally surprised. The students are “convinced” that the mere fact of having a mecanum drive system alone was the sole discriminator, although I’d hate to believe that a team is rejected from a pick list directly because of that factor – and rather that it was a summation of little things noticed by teams that influenced scouting.
Since I am having trouble putting my finger on it specifically, I would love some guidance and constructive criticism from other teams on what other factors led to this situation so we can make future improvements.

2

Last season 1678 stated on Chief that anyone with tank treads for a drive train was immediately taken out of consideration for their alliance. So your drive train historically can be a reason for you to be out of consideration. With how important defense was in playoffs this year, I can see mecanum drive trains giving picking teams pause in alliance selection.

If I remember correctly, the only mecanum robot in all of worlds playoffs was 1323, and they were the best fuel shooter of Turing, along with being a top 5 gear robot.
Being mecanum isn’t necessarily an exclusion, but you have to be pretty exceptional to make up for the cons of mecanum.

That being said, we can’t really fault alliance 1 from Roebling for their alliance selection decisions, cause they won Einstein.

3

Is this true? 1323 was the ONLY robot anywhere in Houston Elims this year who had mecanum drive, even including 3rd picks? We did not scout other divisions so I’d like more confirmation on this.

This question was really about all alliances and not directed towards Alliance 1 (who did an incredible job and congrats to them for their performance on Einstein)

4

1323 has a swerve drive.

5

Correct, I tend to classify them both in the same mold of “easy to push around”.

6

Why would you classify a swerve drive as “easy to push around?”

7

It’s very common for top teams automatically put teams with mecannum wheels on a do not pick list. They are often considered a liability when comparable non mecannum wheel robots are also available.

8

That’s definitely not right, I know for certain that 492 had mecanum, and they were the first seed on Galileo. I believe there were others as well.

9

I definitely don’t know that for a fact, by no means did I watch every single match of every single division. But generally speaking, tank drive is always a great option regardless of the game.
I would say tho, not having watched your matches, but if I was the one scouting I would see mecanum and cross you off my list. Another likely scenario is that not all teams scout, and many times across all events we see teams in playoffs that probably shouldn’t be, and teams not getting picked that definitely should have been.
Something I always tried to do when i was on a team was go around and market my team to the top 8, tell them why they should pick my robot over someone else. It may not actually convince them, but it also may be just enough to push you from 2nd to 1st on someones list.

10

I generally let my students develop their own criteria and scouting processes, but I advise that the following are critical at the Champs elimination level:

1: Overall reliability. You can make measurements such as climb rate, but I also just look at climbing mechanisms and listen to my gut. Somewhere out there is a frying pan climber that I love.

2: High effectiveness in a specific role area.

3: Performance under duress: Lots of alliances at champs can score a 4 rotor. It is a lot harder to score a 4 rotor under heavy defense.

4: Reliability under duress: I look for reasons to believe a robot can continue to function when it is getting banged and bashed. Do the electronics look neat, traceable, accessible? Is the drive train looking fragile?

5: Effectiveness of the pit crew: I make my students do all the work, so we will have a lot of trouble getting above a certain level, but you can size up a pit crew from watching them work: Can they swarm the machine and do multiple fixes in parallel? Well great! But wait. They are making multiple fixes in parallel? See #1.

6: Analytic capacity of the the drive team.

7: Temperament and perspective of the lead technical people: Like marriage, your ideal match may not be mine. But some will be a bad match for all.

8: Ability to get to 40 KPA

9: Gearing rate. Someone else can go crazy with the spreadsheet.

10: Speed and maneuverability of drive train and drivers. I thought we did really well at this this year.

11: Lower team number. This always is a good indicator :smiley:

Chris Kuszmaul
Head Coach, Paly Robotics, team 8
6th degree black belt.
So there.

11

Several reasons, chief of which being that I have little experience with swerve or mecanum. I could be very mistaken with saying they are easy to push around.

12

I suggest you investigate these types of drivetrains further before making assumptions like these. The physics behind what makes a mecanum drive function simultaneously also decrease the total tractive force they can both apply and resist. However, that is not true for swerve drives, which can use the same high traction wheels as tank drives and can guarantee their drive motors are aligned to the ideal directions to either directly resist pushing forces or to evade pushing forces.

13

So my team was not a part of Robling (We were in Galileo), but I think I can provide some general feedback.

Did you guys perform consistently? Usually, second-third picks are picked for consistency, especially in this year’s game where climbs are a must.

Did you guys have a ground gear intake mechanism? Due to the importance of gears in this year’s game, being able to pick up gears from the ground would be another key feature teams might be looking for, especially if they didn’t have their own.

Did you guys have an auto? In scouting our previous regional and talking with other teams, our team noticed that the ability to do an auto gear was a strong discriminator in teams that had a strong climb rate, but weaker ability to place gears. So, after seeing our first few matches play our poorly due to various reasons, we tuned our robot to do a side-gear auto and performed it on every match afterwards which, while inconstant, was a large factor in our team being picked despite being ranked really low (65/67).

Also realize that mechanisms that you may think are strong may look weaker to other teams. For example, mecanum wheels, while being excellent at allowing you to line up to the peg, are also very weak in terms of pushing power. So if another team plays defense on you, you would have little power to stop them. And if there were plenty more teams in your field that could perform equally as yours or better without a mecanum drive, then you would appear less favorable.

Finally, it just might be that you were unlucky. Our team has improved our scouting and strategy system significantly over the past few years, where we are now using a custom scouting app developed by the team and using that data with Tableau. Something we’ve noticed when looking at how alliance selections are determined is that the top 3-4 teams are the ones that usually have good scouting systems which allows them to make logical choices in their alliance members. Other teams below that threshold typically, from what we’ve seen, pick inconsistently due to various factors such as having poor scouting data. Looking at our own data, there were plenty of teams in all of the events we scouted that were skipped over for reasons we could not really determine.

As a side note, this topic would probably get more discussion if it was posted under the strategy/scouting subforum.

14

First, I’d like to commend you for seeking advice and pursuing improvement. That is an awesome attitude.

Did you miss any climbs? Some teams are very quick to bump teams down on their lists after missing a relatively small number of climbs.

Some more general advice: be communicative with potential captains. At Tech Valley, my head scout and I had our eye on 5952 all weekend: they were a consistent gear cycler but their climbing record was questionable (~50% climb rate in quals). Saturday morning, I went to talk to them and check out their robot. Their climber looked good, so I asked them what the problem was. They told me that their velcro wasn’t sticking to their rope. With this information, we picked them, helped them sew velcro to their rope, and went on to upset the #1 alliance and win the regional. Everyone was better off because of the information they provided us.

For those of you reading this who are going to St. Louis: if you miss a climb(s) early on (or have any other robot issues for that matter), I strongly recommend:

  • not missing any later climbs for any reason
  • be ready to explain why you missed the climb
  • be ready to explain what the solution was, if it was any sort of robot issue
15

Advertise! You shouldn’t count on just stats to make teams know who you are, especially since there were so many good gearbots in Roebling. One way to make yourself known is to be proactive and go to other teams instead of waiting for them to come to you. On the day before alliance selection for every event, we create a one-page sheet of the most important statistics and hand them personally to teams along with a few words.

Something else that helps teams remember us is scouting. Before every match, the driveteam and strategy/scouting leads look at our scouting data and use it to form a match plan, which we then bring up to other teams. Teams will remember us by our strong pre-match discussions, especially if it leads to a win.

16

To answer these questions:

Our 2-second climb was successful 11 out of 12 times (we had to play 2 replay matches). We delivered the final gear or shot critical tiebreak kPa during the last 30 seconds with the extra time we had with the fast climb.

We had side and middle gear autos that succeeded 9 times (out of 11). One of the autos we did a hopper + shooting.

Our own scouts reported a consistent 5 gear delivery per match, and I have video of every match to back that up

17

To follow up a bit more on Matt’s question-what activities did you undertake off the field to familiarize other teams with your teams performance and potential?

18

How much did you talk to the other teams during the event? When it comes down to 2 teams of equal performance the team who has a social relationship with the picking teams will win out just about everytime.

There is a schmoozing/networking aspect to each event that is just as critical as robot performance and scouting.

19

While 1511 was doing our alliance selection at the Midwest Regional, mecanum wheels were almost an automatic no for us because after watching match videos again, you can see how easy it is to get pushed around. This calls for not so great defense because you’l’ be the one getting pushed around more than being the pusher.

20

Our secondary driver refers to mecanum robots as “hockey pucks” because they are so easy to push around. So for the future, think about how much defense there will be, and how much you actually need omnidirectional motion, before you go for a mecanum drive. In general, the easier it is to move about the field, the more defense there will be. And in most cases, 2015 being a notable exception due to the total lack of defense, a tank drive will be fine if your driver has practice aligning. So if you have the resources, building a practice driveframe in the offseason is a great investment. We used ours for most of build season to practice aligning with the feeder station and peg, and it paid off.