Despite having been to worlds 3 times, now, my team has never won a robot award (like Eng Excellence, Industrial Design, Autonomous Award.) So for next year, I wanted to aim and try to win one, and seeing that I am a programmer, Autonomous award would likely be the one I have most control over. I was wondering if any teams that have won have any advice on what I should do? As of right now, I just plan on making a decently intuitive auto, utilizing, Limelight, Apriltags, PID loops, etc.
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Incorporating autonomous or even partially autonomous actions into teleop is huge
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Blinky lights.
I absolutely hate it but blinky lights can get you any software award you want. Make the lights look cool and do something tangentially useful. Limelight sees a target? Blinky lights turn green. Etc.
Make sure they’re easily visible from the judge seats during matches.
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See, we tried that. Now we have two Innovation in Control and no Autonomous….probably because the actual autonomous routine was broken but still.
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iirc the Autonomous award requires the 15s auto routine to be consistent throughout the competition
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6328 had some examples of some really useful ways to do it. In the past I would have knocked the concept…but they deliever a lot of good info to their drivers through the LED strips.
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These are all great suggestions but they are missing a key component. Winning specific awards often has a lot more to do with how you communicate to the judges than it does with a specific technical accomplishment.
You could have the best programmed and most automated robot on the field and if you can’t articulate that to the judges consistently (read: everyone in the pits conveying the same message) and concisely (read: a unified and brief message that gets to the point and aligns to the award criteria) then it won’t necessarily correlate into the win you want.
Work with your team on choosing an award to go after and then work together to hone the message to win that award. It’s still not a certainty but learning to communicate effectively is part of the challenge.
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ding ding ding!
Winning the award is three steps:
- learn something
- do something
- Communicate 1 and 2
Consider how much time you get with a judge (~10 minutes?) and how much time it takes to do 1 and 2 (weeks? months?). Spend time considering how you describe months of details in just a few minutes.
Look to both tell your story, but also engage with and find common ground with the judge. Figure out what they know, and adjust your storytelling on the fly to match where the judges are at. Learning and speaking specifically to your audience will maximize information transfer.
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I believe one thing that the judges really liked was us really going in depth into the explanation, it shows that we really know what we were talking about.
Another thing I think is that we talked about how we developed it by ourselves, and I think they also really like modularity and changeability, explain how your autonomous routines are easily changeable and modular, and condenses complex tasks into some kind of state, as well as simple to read.
We didn’t exactly have the highest scoring autonomous in any of our events, but us expressing how we can easily change it helped.
I would say “do something novel” or “do something way better” (or both).
Lots of people balanced on the charging station using the NavX or similar.
If you could say, to pick some possibly plausible thing: “we found that balancing by measuring relative wheel slippage allowed us to reliably auto balance nearly instantaneously giving us 11 more seconds to complete cycles in teleop”. THAT’S a really compelling autonomous story.
It’s also helpful to know that the judges are trying to narrow their selections down using whatever criteria they can and there is a lot of competition for any given award. Teams can only win one award per competition and many teams qualify for several categories, so once a team is awarded something, they are scratched off of other lists. If you are only on one list, you may not stand out. Being on multiple award short-lists is helpful because it shows that you might deserve to be given that 5pt boost, but maybe you just weren’t a top contender. So, between other teams being scratched off ahead of you and standing out on a few different fronts, you may be able to snag an award, but it may not even be an award you thought you were trying to get.
Visualizations help a lot. At worlds, we gave judges a 3D visualization of our autos in our pits using AdvantageScope which seemed to impress them. Visualizations are also way more helpful for demonstrating things pose estimation and odometry correction and showing your judges said data on a viewer like AdvantageScope will almost always be more effective and get you one step closer to that rizzing up the judges and securing that auto award 
.
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Frankly, the number of judges who don’t understand that the autonomous award isn’t strictly about the autonomous period alarms me. I’ve been in many judging rooms where I and other folks try to explain this and people just…don’t get it. I don’t know why, but it’s the reality.
This is going to sound dumb, but make sure you use the word “autonomous” a lot as you’re describing to the judges. Don’t assume that because you say something like “pre-programmed” or explain something as driven by input from sensors, judges will make the mental leap to autonomous.
Bad: “We use X sensor which allows the robot to know when to release Y mechanism”
Good: “We use X sensor which autonomously allows the robot to know when to autonomously release Y mechanism”
You think I’m kidding? I’m not.
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The more accurate description would be to do something that seems novel or seems better to the judges. What this may be can vary significantly based on the judges and their understanding or lack thereof of FRCFIRST Robotics Competition and robotics.
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There are two parts to the autonomous aware - match observers and pit interviews. You need to be the best at both!
For match observers, that means making your autonomous actions obvious. Obviously, the autonomous period is obvious… but lets be honest, how many auto’s this year were exactly the same? You can have a great auto that places a game piece and balances, or goes and grabs and places another game piece, but that just means you’re one of a dozen teams that are doing that exact same thing. There’s nothing to set you apart. As a match observer, it can be incredibly difficult to tell when autonomous actions are happening in teleop. Having lights that indicate it can be helpful for that. In years with more complicated climbing (like Deep Space or Rapid React), if your climbing is autonomous, then make it obvious that it is - drivers get lined up, hit the “go” button, then set down the controls and take a step back while the robot does its thing!
For pit interviews, everyone needs to be on the same page. When the judges get there and say “tell me about your robot”, don’t be generic. Tell then about sensors, autonomous routines, and all that Have video of your autonomous stuff on a phone or tablet that you can show them. Heck, I’ve heard of teams straight up telling judges “This is the award we want, and here’s why we think we deserve it”.
This isn’t just advice for autonomous, either - any award you want, consider how you talk to the judges about that award, and consider how what you show on (robot awards) and around (things like team spirit or imagery can be noted by match observers as well!) the field can impact that award. In the end, go to competition with a plan, and a shortened list of awards that you want to go for!
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For getting everyone in the pits on the same page about our robot stats and what to emphasize to the judges, my last team found it helpful to print a bunch of copies of our technical binder and have everyone study and quiz each other. Some students studied in the airport or the hotel (for travel competitions), or during the practice day if they weren’t in the pit that day, and everyone brushed up while we were waiting in line to get into our regionals. Finding times to study together, when there wasn’t a lot else to do, was critical. No one wants to sit down a read a technical binder by themselves, but they enjoyed reading sections out loud to each other, quizzing each other, and having the captains nearby so they could ask them questions about what certain phrases meant. It can be tough to pull off (for one, it requires having a good technical binder, written and printed in time for competition), but we found it helped a lot and we won more awards in the years we did this.
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This is spot on. Many teams don’t know that judges will never ask you specific questions right off the bat to hone in on a specific award. It is up to your team to set goals and create a story focused on specific awards.
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A fair point to be sure. Perception is more important than reality here.
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I don’t really get the point - why do you have to study the thing you already made? Aren’t you supposed to already know it by working on the robot during the season?
There is a difference between knowing what happened, and being able to tell the story of what happened. You can know exactly how a part was developed and how it works, but if you then have a judge in front of you and start telling that in a manner without structure it will have way less of an impact than a story that has a start, middle and end that are all to the point.
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