Teams, what is your post-kickoff schedule?

With the incoming 2024 season, I’ve been trying to figure out a better approach to strategy and robot design brainstorming for my team.

Just after the kick-off event, we usually go home and read the game manual indivudually. Two days later, we all gather up (mentors, rookies and veterans) and discuss our robot strategy in one big group. Well, what commonly happens is that one or two people lead the entire meeting with ideas, while rookies and other shy students only listen, even thought we do encorage their opinions.

The same happens to deciding robot design. On the day after strategy meeting, the students again share ideas in one big group.

I just feel like this isn’t the best schedule. Next year, we will be competing in a Week 1 event, so spending 3 to 4 days for this inital brainstorming with limited ideas being shared seems like a downgrade.

Because of that, I was willing to hear you guys team’s schedule after just watching the kickoff event. What do you do and how do you do it?

7 Likes

This happens immediately after we see the game animation for us, and it’s common for us to brainstorm for several hours on kickoff day.

During that we decide what we want our robot to reasonably be able to do, and then from there we decide our priorities in abilities, and maybe some basic design designs.

3 Likes

yes, same for us usually, 1st day immediately after kickoff is brainstorm, manual breakdown, and kit inventory day. Usually the goal for us is to have a rough idea of what we want by the following monday so that parts orders for game specific stuff can be ordered as soon as possible. CAD designs we hope are at least finished with their first iterations within the first 4-5 days and ready for team review.

5 Likes

Here is 4476’s goal timeline for 2024.

Check out 2910’s recent talk on their process/timeline for their design.

4 Likes

4322 is attempting to build a robot in 4 weeks this year and this is the schedule we came up with. We are going to do as much as we can before the season starts, like building COTS swerve and publishing the CAD and code for that before kickoff so it is legal to use.
Prior to kickoff, we split students into 4 groups and tell them what section of the rules they will be analyzing when the manual is released. They then take around 10 minutes in their groups noting down the rules on sticky notes on Miro board, then come together as a team for 20 minutes to discuss their findings. Students are also split up into groups when brainstorming and prototyping different subsystems.

5 Likes

It sounds like you may want to focus on those first few days of build season. For my team, we spend Saturday focused on reading the rules, discussing the rules, and watching video from previous similar games. I think it is critical to get as many student and mentor voices into this discussion.

To facilitate that, my team will break up into groups of ~6 people, read in small groups, and take notes. I do think reading together is important - not all team members know what they are looking for or how detailed they need to be. Last year, we then spent some time later in the afternoon having each group focus on a specific aspect of the game to discuss, with each group cycling through a list of topics. We don’t talk robot designs at all on Saturday.

On Sunday, we develop possible strategies and robot archetypes. The goal is to have a list of all the things a robot could possibly do on the field, then decide which ones for us are a MUST. The tougher part is always deciding which actions we’re not even going to try to do. We aim to center the discussion on our team goals which we’ve already agreed upon before kickoff.

We start some basic prototyping either late on Sunday afternoon or on Monday. But I think a lot of the important work happens in the rule reading and bringing out as many voices from the team as possible. Not everyone’s ideas are going to make it into the final design, but it matters that everyone reads the rules and has a say.

We described out 2023 kickoff process in this post in our OA thread from last year: FRC 1466 Webb Robotics – 2023 Build Thread - #5 by DaM11Tr11

3 Likes

I would HIGHLY recommend Shelby’s thread on this!

5 Likes

As soon as the kickoff broadcast is done we rewatch the reveal and any useful field tour type videos, then read the rules. Everyone has the option to read quietly on their own, or we usually have a group reading room. I don’t remember our exact schedule but we discuss key rules and any questions people have from the rule reading. Rereading again at home is highly encouraged. From that point we break into small groups to discuss something then each group presents to the whole team: game strategy, game play and score predictions, possible robot functions (no technical detail), weighted objectives, general mechanism concepts… there are a series of short brainstorm/ discussion sessions running the rest of Saturday and Sunday. We also run a couple sets of human matches on Saturday and Sunday to develop our understanding of game strategy. We have usually started extremely rough prototypes and maybe some CAD by Sunday evening. By Monday we are transitioning to the normal sub-teams for the rest of the season. Meanwhile a group of mentors and team parents are on field build starting Saturday afternoon and usually running for a couple days.

2 Likes

Calling @mochihammer … dude has detailed plans.

But the tl;dr is this:
Day 1: Familiarize with manual (test/worksheet), brainstorm possible actions and possible alliance strategies, test them out in simulation
Day 2: Figure out where we fit in that alliance model and refine further, begin brainstorming robot concepts in small groups

2 Likes

Chaos.

Our kickoff strategy hasn’t changed much since I wrote about it in 2019

2 Likes

Our schedule for the start of the build season is the following:

Saturday - Similarly to what others have said, we review the game manual in a group after the game animation is revealed. We split the students into groups to each tackle a section of the game manual (robot, field, etc.). Anytime anyone has a question, it gets written on a white board at the front of the room. Each group presents their section, and we make sure we answer all the questions we can that were written down (although we usually have 1 or 2 highly specific questions and we have to wait for Q&A or talk to other teams).

Sunday - We usually have a shorter meeting Sunday. The last year or two we started finding fun ways to review the rules at the start of the meeting (some sort of game or quizlet or something like that). From there we review what we think the best strategy is and what the most important parts of the game is going to be to drive our initial designs. Students then get homework to find find potential prototypes (can draw out their own, build something with legos, find videos of examples).

Monday - Decide what mechanisms we want to prototype. Split into groups to decide what the metrics we will measure each prototype by and start building. The prototyping usually continues throughout week 1.

At some point early in week 1, the CAD team splits off to start setting up the drivetrain in SolidWorks. Ideally, by the end of week 1, we have the drivetrain setup in CAD, have decided which mechanisms we are going to proceed forward with and have a rough mock-up of our chosen prototypes started in CAD.

1 Like

For us, after the kickoff Livestream, we all sit down and read the game specific rules together. Then we all break up into groups, starting with 2 students per group to come up with strategy ideas. Once the groups of two come up with ideas, we merge the groups into groups of four and repeat. And then into groups of eight and so on until we come together as one big group to present all our strategies and ideas.

We then go home for the day to further come up with ideas and discuss them on Teams until Monday when we finalize our strategy and begin discussing prototypes.

1 Like

Kickoff Saturday is spent rewatching game reveal video, dissecting the rules and discussing possible strategies. We talk a lot about WHAT we want the robot to do. This discussion fills the day and usually into the next meeting as well.
Once we figure out the WHAT, then we start brainstorming the HOW.
There is certainly more to it than that, but this is our first few days in a nutshell. Make sure you understand the rules and figure out a strategy from there. Strategy (what) should dictate design (how).

Like many other teams, we have everyone study the manual just after reveal on Saturday and then we start discussion of what we want our robot to be able to do. Anyone who starts down the path of how we would do things gets (somewhat gleefully) told “that sounds like a Monday discussion”. On Monday, we start thinking about how to accomplish the what goals, which leads to things like investigating previous similar games and robots and into prototyping ideas and what we call “Crayola CAD” (super quick&dirty sketches). Once things start to solidify, then a “master sketch” which shows the path of game pieces through the robot and the space claims, but not the design of, various mechanism (eg climber needs to fit in this cube of space). Now the mechanism sub-teams start refining their designs – the important part here is that they don’t operate in a vacuum – regular coordination is critical.

[EDIT] Also on Saturday we tape out the game field and elements on the floor and have people pretend to be robots playing the game. We find this gives us a better understanding than we can get from the video.

1 Like

Happy to share our process with you. Streamlining the kickoff process to better fit our season needs is something I’ve been focusing on these past few months, and my team is in the same spot as you, competing in a Week 1. Here’s is what we’re planning on doing this year.

Basically, the premise is that there’s four main pillars going into kickoff.

Strategy:

  • Determine the Ideal Alliance Strategy (the theoretically most optimal way to play the game) through a timed analysis, game simulations, etc.
  • Determine our team’s role in that IAS
  • Determine the set of robot functions that support our role in that IAS

Robot Concepts:

  • From that set of robot functions, determine a robot architecture that dictates the types of mechanisms and high-level concept of operations of the robot
  • Ideate all possible ways to support that robot architecture mechanism-wise

Prototyping:

  • Proof of concept prototypes “fail quickly” – determine if some ideas can work
  • Optimization prototypes – advance some ideas we know will work (rollers on a soft ball, for example)
  • Game / field piece interaction – gain an understanding of how different game pieces interact with field elements and each other

Field Pieces:

  • Construct field pieces, including a mock field for the game simulations. High-priority field pieces are things like loading stations or pieces that directly interact with a large amount of scoring

We also have groups working on the drivetrain for the upcoming season (swerve or not, and if swerve, can we proceed with our reference swerve drive), an awards group that focuses on Outreach and Awards, etc.

The attached schedule details, especially on the strategy side, how we break down the game. It attempts to answer questions like “how do I come up with a strategy”, or “how do I know if I brainstormed all the ideas?” Some key things to note that might be slightly different from most teams:

  • We intentionally try to think of the most “perfect” way to play the game, and determine our role in that. Depending on our capabilities and what we determine that strategy to be; maybe it’s 50% of what the captain can do. Maybe it’s 75% of the first pick. But this approach allows us to have a good idea on how to approach the game, and make sure we’re tailoring our functions to the highest levels of play.
  • We determine the robot architecture by midday Sunday. This isn’t a “here is the intake, we will use rollers and shoot using this kind of shooter”, rather it’s a general conceptual idea on the robot’s concept of operations. Things like “full-width over the bumper intake, centering relative to shooter, shoot on the opposite side of the intake 270 deg”. This is driven by a few reasons:
    • We saw that our prototype quality varied greatly, and thus were making some poor decisions in terms of what mechanisms fundamentally work together, and sometimes led to a massive increase in complexity if the handoffs proved to be complicated
    • Our matrix to decide which prototypes to pursue was too “feeling” based, which left out good options and led us down the wrong path sometimes
    • The robot architecture method allows us to focus more on choosing and iterating the best implementation from a concept where the mechanism works well together in a fundamental sense

I don’t know if this approach will work for all teams, but we’re trying to push a heavier iteration-based approach and this kickoff process is just one way to support that.

2 Likes

usually it consists of listen to complaints about how long the manual is, then come up with a bunch of ideas we usually just completely scrap cause someone has a way better one a few days later lol

Thank you for the explanation!

I reckon parallelizing activities within subgroups might save some time. Have you always opted for this separation? I’m asking because our approach was always inserting everyone into strategy analysis process (and I’ve always seen other teams doing the same - as some commented in this post), so I’m curious about what are the benefits you see in your subgroups approach right at the beginning of KickOff. Maybe we can start implementing this here as well.

Also, I just looked at the sheets you shared. What exactly are the crucial points you detail in the Game Manual Worksheet Debrief? Would it be possible to share a model of it?

Thanks again!

1 Like

The reasons for the separation are:

  • The team size has increased massively over the last 4-5 years for us and we are now at 80-ish students and 10-ish mentors. Having a large team means two things: it’s pretty inefficient and disengaging if we have all 80 students do strategy, and we also have the resources to parallelize some prototyping efforts, field piece efforts, etc.
  • We have a strategy and systems design subteam now that prepare some of the supporting components to make kickoff go smoother. This doesn’t mean only strategy subteam members are allowed to do strategy on kickoff, but we have a core group of students who are familiar with strategy generation.

We have everyone read the game manual, so we make sure everyone is aware and understand the rules. Also, for reference, our Strategy group on kickoff is broken up into subgroups of 4 students each. So you have around 5-6 small groups that independently come up with these possible Ideal Alliance variations, and it helps us have a ton of different ideas that are independently generated and hopefully, by having these independent approaches, we converge on the “best” options.

For the Game Manual Worksheet, we based ours heavily off of worksheets like 6328’s, 973’s, and 5414’s. The goal is to just have a way to make sure the students are reading the manual and understanding it, and hopefully have discussions as they read through and fill out the worksheets. We have every student fill out the worksheet, but encourage collaboration. In past years we’ve had students take a test to make sure they read the rules, but it often turned out to be a control+f fiesta where students didn’t really read the rules because they wanted to know the game, but rather because they wanted to pass the test.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.