Ok, we all know how important drive practice is, but it’s the age old problem of having the robot ready in time to get that practice in. So, how are we doing on drive practice these days?
Please select how much actual DEDICATED drive practice (not stopping and fixing stuff) that your drive team gets in before your first regional or district competition the last couple of years.
< 5 hours
5-10 hours
10-20 hours
20+ hours
Wait, y’all are getting drive practice?!
0voters
Would love some conversation about what goals teams set for drive practice and how y’all achieve them.
Following along with this thread. In previous years, we’ve regularly been in the category of “y’all get drive practice?!”.
One of our main goals for this year is to ensure we give our drive team practice before our first event. To help aid that goal, we’ve already held driver tryouts, and subsequently selected our drivers (the STEMley Cup offseason event helped tremendously with that). Typically that hasn’t happened until week 4 or 5 of build season in the past for us…
Most people stating “20+ Hours” aren’t remotely close to that.
20+ hours is equivalent to playing in 480 matches. It would be like doing all of qualifications at 40 district events… people are maybe doing “driver practice” for 20+ hours, but most aren’t actually driving the robot for that amount of time going into their first event.
6045 had a completed robot on February 1st… we met frequently to do drive practice. We just barely made that threshhold before our week 1 event.
I voted 20+ hours but that was not 20+ hours with the full robot. We would do 2 hours of practice every week of cycling and positioning with our mapped out system. Then when the systems were complete, testing went easier. It was also good to have an “if everything breaks” what can we do strat.
I know our stretch goal is 100 hours of drive practice (not actual robot moving time just total time with bot), however we’ve only hit that once in 2018 and that had some very specific conditions that allowed that. Usually we are in the 60-80 range before first event, and it lets us shake most of the issues out, and makes sure our drivers feel as comfortable with the robot as possible.
I interpreted the question as time spent dedicated to drive practice. If we had a 3-hour session with a robot and drive team dedicated to drive practice, I called that 3 hours. It’s hard to imagine people trying to split up that 3 hours into actual stick time versus field reset, battery changes, performance critique, practice run objective selection (auto routine, cube or cone run, high or low grid priority, etc.) or just getting a drink or using the restroom. I would include minor maintenance in this time as well. Not major fixes, but things like tightening a chain.
Considering this definition of what dedicated drive practice means, we are not a 20+ hours team, but we’ve almost certainly exceeded 10 hours most seasons. We don’t set a specific goal for practice time, but we recognize the importance of it and we try to get in as much as we can. Having a second robot most years helps increase practice time. Some of the practice might be with a robot that does not have 100% of the functionality of the robot that goes to the first event, but it’s usually close enough to improve driver ability. We will sometimes schedule sessions just for drive practice that are not during standard work hours. I can’t remember the last season where we did not spend the final day or two before the first event with the drive team practicing while the rest of the team was working to organize pit tools, equipment, parts, and materials and getting it all prepped and packed. The last things to go into the fully-loaded truck are the robot and driver station after we pry those away from the drive team.
That’s what I had in mind as well. My first thought was, it might be difficult to determine how much “stick time” the drive team is actually getting. I guess it would be possible through creative logging, but it still might be difficult to separate actual drive practice from testing or programming time.
A more interesting question for me would be what type of field and field elements do you have access to for practicing?
We have a minimal amount of wooden field elements and rarely have access to a completely carpeted area to drive in (half wooden floor and not very big). Back when we still had bag day one of the biggest step changes in team resources was being able to have a second robot for software tuning and driver practice once the robot was bagged. These days I think that the big dividing line between the ‘haves’ and ‘havenots’ is the ability to practice with a full field area and high quality field elements.
So someone from a top level team, please make me envious with a description of how awesome your practice field is.
Last year was our first dive into Swerve. I’m counting every bit of drive practice with a swerve base even if it was just touch and return to a target going around obstacles.
We do a lot of driving drills on swerve. With new drivers, we get a lot of repetition in on touching a side of the robot against an object of the field, then rotating that same side and traveling to another location on the field. Smooth rotation during the move instead of move-then-rotate. It takes time to get it down and feel natural.
Last year we used a carpeted area about 1/3 of the field area, along with wooden practice elements made by parents. There were a couple of autos we couldn’t quite get dialed in because of a wall, but it was ok. But we were definitely missing out on full-field runs for practice.
This year we’re hoping to use a larger area, but it has a shorter ceiling, which is a risk until we see kickoff.
I interpreted drive practice time as the time our competition driver was operating the robot on the field.
We are very fortunate to work in a STEM Center with a full-sized field. The replica field elements are typically completed by the end of the second week after Kickoff.
Our competition driver started driving the old robot chassis on the field the beginning of Week 3. He practiced running “scoring cycles” and getting onto the platform for 3-4 hours, 2-3 times each and every week.
There were also old robots from some of the 6 other teams based at the STEM Center but they were typically being driven by their programmers working on their scoring programs or Autonomous routines.
Our competition bot was completed about a week and a half before our first competition in Week 2. Our competition driver switched over and adapted quickly. We used his experience driving to adjust the design of the comp bot to make it easier to get onto the platform.
We had designed a “helper bot” but ended up ranking 4th because our robot was done and our driver was well practiced. About 1/3 of the robots at our first event were clearly not completed. Our first pick was a team our robot was meant to help but their programming was not finished. They outranked us at our 2nd event when they finished.
There were also another other local rookie team that brought their Everybot to practice at our field for several weekends. It was not a surprise to me that they also qualified for the District Championship.
We intend to have our competition driver start practicing in the 3rd week after Kickoff again in 2024. Since we have a lot of team members, the intent is to build an Everybot in addition to our comp bot so our driver can practice playing defense and playing against defense.
Our goal is usually to have a full week of practice, but it’s usually been condensed to the day prior with the actual competition robot.
Generally, we operate a “crawl, walk, run” strategy.
Crawl: Early in build season, we will use either the completed competition drivetrain or a similar old one and just clean up pathing for cycles. You want the drivers to be SUPER comfortable with the expected cycles and variants. Probably 3-5h here over the course of several weeks.
Walk: When the robot is mechanically complete, and programming is working on it, drivers will just practice scoring (no driving/cycling) and getting good at that, as well as implementing callouts for coach/driver communication. Probably 1-3h total time the week prior to competition.
Run: Aimed for the last several days, but really only the last day in actuality, full match-length (or longer) full-field cycles with callouts. We’re lucky to have a full-length field, but it’s piecemeal carpet with no boundary and has to be taken down between meetings, so it’s probably only ~60% realistic. The closer you can get to a real field, the better! Roughly 3h on the last day.
ARC had at least 3 teams with well over 20 hours of drive time on our field last year. We have just over 20 teams, so that’s 15%. In fact the distribution on the poll looks about right to me.
Most teams (that bothered to use the field) had more than a single day. Most of the driving wasn’t done at competition intensity, but there was plenty of back and forth between the loading stations and scoring platform. Pick up a game piece, score a game piece, repeat until the game pieces need to be restocked then start over.
