Kickoff Days 1 and 2: Game Manual Review and Strategy Discussion!
Hi everyone, we’re back from break and have been jumping into our analysis of Reefscape. As I explained earlier in the thread, most students arrived on campus on the 6th, so our first team meeting was on the 7th - but we’re cooking now!
Day 1: Robot Actions and Game Manual Review!
After kickoff, team members and mentors worked together to create a rules quiz, testing students on their knowledge of the game and its various mechanics. Students are expected to score above a certain percent on this quiz (but have infinite attempts to do so) - this is to make sure that everyone can be engaged in discussion and to make sure students have the opportunity to learn important aspects of the game regardless of how much they have time to read the manual.
After making sure everyone had time to complete the quiz, the team worked as a whole to come up with a list of actions that any given robot could complete, ranging from descoring coral to simply being able to move.
Teams then split into groups, each creating 3 robot architectures:
- “C” Team, or what a group thought a robot in the bottom 25% would accomplish
- “B” Team, a robot around the 50th percentile of teams
- “A” Team, a robot in the top 25%
Day 1.5: Game Simulation
On Wednesday, using our A, B, and C robot architectures, we planned out Auto, Teleop, and Endgame strategies. We broke down the match into 5 second increments and determined what the robot should be accomplishing during each. Using these timelines, we played 4 mock-reefscape games. Each match consisted of two alliances, made up of some combination of A, B, and C teams. The games helped familiarize the team to more nuances of the game, and was really fun (and some exercise?!). If there is anything that we took away from the simulation, it’s that as expected, the number one thing that matters in this game is how fast you can score. The robot being able to auto-align and accelerate very fast (we are using L1+ gearing) have the opportunity to increase the ceiling a lot.
Day 2: Strategy Decisions
Yesterday the team gathered together to make our decisions about what we wanted the robot to accomplish. To help drive these strategic decisions, the team leadership worked together to create goals for how well we hope to do at our competitions (robot wise). They were the following:
Waterbury, Week 2:
- Rank in the top 3
- Finish as a finalist or higher
Hartford, Week 5:
- Rank in the top 5
- Finish 3rd place or higher
While these are definitely ambitious goals, we hope that we can get a bit closer to an event victory than last year. Main focuses early on will be robot reliability and programming readiness.
With these goals in mind, the team worked through each possible strategy and decided on the following:
Why did we choose these strategic priorities?
Reef L1-L4: Last year we struggled with winning matches. We decided that scoring on all levels of the reef, especially L4, was an extremely high priority for us, as we think this is the best way to score a high amount of points since it is the single highest point value task and ultimately has the power to win us matches.
Removing Algae: We also think that it is important to be able to remove algae from the reef ourselves. Because cycles are so short, at high levels of play it might be possible for a robot to complete 15 cycles on its own, but getting the coral RP is only possible if some algae is removed.
Station intake: We decided that it was necessary for us to have a station intake, as it is an important ability to have in auto so we can reliably obtain more coral. We decided against a ground intake because of the added complexity, prototyping challenge, and we think our efforts are best spent on other aspects of the game (especially software).
Deep cage: When we saw the game release, we all thought that the cage was going to be very hard, and something we probably didn’t want to do. However, watching Ri3d has inspired us to try and accomplish the climb, both its high point value and assurance of the barge RP.
Algae in processor: This skill is in our “nice to have” section because we don’t think it is absolutely necessary for our robot to be able to do it. We have seen from Ri3d that a very simple mechanism can accomplish this task, and we will try to find a place for it in our final design.
Anyway, here’s our robot 
(It wouldn’t be a game if 7407 didn’t build some type an elevator)
