The missing feature: A common thread

FIRST General Forum
#21

Teams come up with these ideas because they jump through hoops backwards to come up with them. A ‘powerhouse’ team, as they’re dubbed, doesn’t want an average design. They want an extraordinary design, they want the best design, they want the winning design. They look for key elements of the game, and they design their robot around that. Then, not only do they come up with a design, they crunch the numbers for it. I’m sure you’ve seen JVN’s design calculator. Those great teams, from what I’ve heard and read, do extensive research and screening into their design, figuring out how to make it better. The result is a robot design they is both unique and effective. The result of THAT, is a robot that dominates the competition. If you look at 2011, roller claws that opened like pincher claws were a great design. They’re the product that out-of-the-box thinking. This year, stingers seem to be that unique design.

As to why teams DON’T come up with those designs, there are a lot of reasons for this. Maybe they don’t have the resources to build a great design they come up with. That always plays a factor. Maybe they misread the game; if you thought making hoops was all you’d need to do to win matches, and disregarded the bridge mostly, save for a simple manipulator, you’d find yourself on the short end of the stick. Or maybe they just don’t have an extensive design process. They come up with a design that works well, but they don’t refine it or verify that it is indeed the best design. Those are just a few reasons that come to mind.

As to your third question, I think it may work both ways. A team becomes a powerhouse by thinking of out-of-the-box designs that win. They then continue to come up with those designs because they have the experience of a process that gave them a good design. It can take years of refinement to get the design process down. But one you’ve got it, I’d imagine it’s pretty hard to lose. So long as things are documented well enough.

#22

Well, if you want to know how 217 became a powerhouse, just pin down Paul Copioli and ask him about it. Getting him to stop talking about how they’ve come as far as they have is harder than getting him to start – that is to say, he’s more than willing to share.

What I’ve gotten out of my conversations with him is that the secret is that there is no secret: hard work and dedication on all fronts, with an honest eye to what needs improvement (be it fundraising or design capability or student recruitment or sponsor involvement or what-have-you).

#23

The thing that has always stood out for me about the Elites is not just the things they build (plenty of non Elites used roller claws and were not nearly as effective last year) but how efficiently they use their time on the field of play. 2 minutes is a very short time and one of the most frustrating things I notice is when a team spends one minute of time doing something as trivial as acquiring a single game piece (I actually saw a team spend one whole minute trying to do just that last year trying to grab a tube from a human player during a match. I can understand doing something like that during a practice match but during a qualification match I would have benched the whole drives team for that) It’s like everything is on a schedule and they make sure they are in position to meet that schedule every time.
The relentless pursuit of perfection does not simply come from designing “Killer Apps” as Ellery Wong on my team would call them but then too hone and perfect the proper use of them (if you gave the use of any of the Elites robots to any old team in FIRST it would be a decent robot than a dominant one because they wouldn’t know how to properly use it to its fullest potential. They would not use the best strategies. They would not know how to get the most out of their alliance partners. They would not keep their plans on time because second tier teams just do not understand those things and it shows through every aspect of their team compared to an Elite. Like Dean says it’s not just about the robot. 67 is a dominant team not just because they build terrific robots with Killer Apps. Not just because they have an adult coach, not just because they have great scouting and strategies, not just because they have great sponsors or school support or supportive parents or dedicated students. It’s because they pursue and expect success in what they do.
When I look and see the (far too many) teams who are the antitheses of that the first thing that always sticks out to me is the severe lack of urgency to anything they do. The chronic apathy they bring to the table. Never mind if they win or lose it’s disturbing how readily they accept missing matches or doing embarrassingly incompetent thing on the field as if it was the whole point of coming out there in the first place.
The Mids see what the Elites are doing and do some of it well but to make it to the Elite level have to take an honest account of themselves and shore up whatever is lacking and many Mids have grown to become Elite over the years because of this.
Too many teams get bent out of shape by the presence of Elites because they are perceived as “pushy and mean”. Type A’s always come off as that but they have a pretty good idea what is needed to be done to win the match and are just trying to get the other teams on board with what to do. It’s natural to resist people telling us what to do. We’re independent creatures by nature it’s perceived as weak to allow others to tell us what to do but if I have a large group of killers trying to break into my house to slaughter me and my family and Chuck Norris shows up at the back door I aint telling the guy “I got this.” I might want to listen to the opinion of the team with all the blue banners on the matter.

#24

I agree with much of what has been said here especially Koko Ed’s thought that complacency is also at fault. I believe that many teams approach the game wrong if they, in fact, really want to win. They view it as “How can we do the task well, quickly and within our manufacturing means.” The elites look at how to accomplish the task the BEST way (that means strategically). They MAKE their design work. They worry about the actual design process last–and rightly so. They know that you have to score, and quickly, to win. There have been phenomenally manufactured robots who have been horrible on the field because the designers were thinking more about manufacturing than strategy. Conversely, there are numerous instances where middle or lower level bots have made it to divisional finals because they had the right strategy and made a robust bot albeit not a manufacturing marvel.
I have thought about this thread for the last two years and think that the elites have figured it out early–game theory and design strategy trumps all else. Now, what makes them elites is that they are able to combine that with deep pockets and better manufacturing processes (iterations, prototypes, quick cnc turn around, practice bots etc.) Many teams have one or the other and then it becomes a hit or miss getting to the finals–you need both to consistently visit Einstein.

#25

This is HUGE. Talk to these teams! Make friends with them! The benefits are immensely helpful! I was picking the brains of several Poofs yesterday at the Central Valley Regional, and learned so much from them, and became inspired to learn CAD because of them (if you ever get the chance, talk to these guys. They’re awesome!).

Start networking… fast. If you aren’t sure if the “elite” team will talk to you (which 99% of the time they will), talk to some other teams/ They may have contacts with other teams, who know a guy who’s uncle’s brother’s nephew is on that elite team. You never know, and all the extra connections help along the way.

#26

The real advantage I see in the over-bumper intake this year is not just the large pickup zone, but also the ability to easily pick up balls next to the edge of the field. With a through-bumper intake your bumpers prevent you from getting sufficiently close to the ball. The ball is practically just the right size for this, and I do not think that is a coincidence.

Also, when a team has little manufacturing capability at their disposal you will often see ideas shot down because they don’t know how they could build it, so it must be impossible. My policy is that every idea is valid for the first two weeks (provided it isn’t blatantly illegal or anything, of course). You’d be surprised the things I’ve seen made with drills and saws alone.

During the first few days after kickoff there is no discussion of actual, physical designs. Instead, the team talks strategy, what we need to do, and how to play the game. Plus, a field is under construction right away.

#27

I also echo everything Don Rotolo said, which I would summarize as “build a machine that plays the game and is easy to operate, and show up ready to play”, which is easier said than done.

I don’t think there is one single feature that separates the best from the rest (on the field). “Elite” or “powerhouse” teams, or whatever you call them, do a good job at everything (concept, prototyping, fabrication, maintenance, resources, practice, tactics, strategy, scouting, etc.). They are always looking for ways to improve as the season goes on, and they are able to do this year after year.

In general, I think that what a team does the first week or so after kickoff is most important. That’s when you set the course for what to build and how to play. After that is mostly how well you accomplish what you set out to do, and how well you can correct your shortcomings from week one of build. It would interesting to record all of your discussions when you were speculating about what the game will look like, and then play them back later. It would be much easier to design a robot if you could foresee how the game actually played out, but nobody has that luxury. If you could improve your speculation and imagination skills, you would have a better chance of building the right machine for the game, and not waste limited resources building dead-end features that aren’t useful.

#28

I think this year the “elite” thing to do was the multi-purpose appendage. The teams who made their appendage do everything from ball collection, bridge manipulation, and aid in balancing. The ones like HOT, Bomb Squad, Titanium, Greyhounds, and countless others that get the job done, and done well.

Year to year, I think that what defines a powerhouse team would be, as stated before, the ability to receive a game and be able to sense what the key factors are, and rapidly prototype to prove that what you’re about to spend the next 5 weeks refining is the absolute best idea for that game.

It also doesn’t hurt that they have dozens of Blue Banners as moral boosters :rolleyes:

#29

MENTORS! Everyone has mentioned lots of valid things in this thread so far, but all of them come when your team gets more and more mentors involved.

Not mentors to design the robot. Not mentors to build the robot. But, overall mentor involvement enables teams to develop sponsors, find resources, prototype more parts, develop better strategy, work with more students, etc…

The one non-random pattern to all the “powerhouse” teams is that they have lots of mentors involved in their team.

On our team we have 15-20 mentors/year. This allows our us to have different sub-groups that focus only on their area (ie; mechanical fab, design, electrical, programming, machining, chairmans, animation, etc…). When we are developing our strategy and initial designs, we are not worried about getting the animation completed or updating the website…that is handled by someone else. We try to grab as many potential mentors as we can…Students parents that are engineers, Former FIRST students, Teachers, etc…

Another powerful thing mentors bring is experience. Yes, real world engineering experience…but more importantly in FRC, the best experience is actual FRC robot design experience. Knowledge of the motors, electronics, gearboxes…where they can be used, how strong or rigid something needs to be. Great students can influence a team for a little bit, but mentors help keep a team strong over a long period of time…which is what is needed to become a “powerhouse” team.

Just like Karthik has been saying for year in his Effective FIRST Strategies seminar at Champs. Step #1 - Develop a simple plan that fits within your teams capabilities. Step #2 - Execute that plan as well as you can. Step #3 - Show those capabilities to potential mentors / sponsors. Ask if they are willing to help improve your team by donating mentoring time. Step #4 - Utilitze new mentor/resources to improve your team. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Over time the performance of you team (be it on or off the field) will improve. Continue to iterate and improve until you are performing at the highest levels, sutain that level over a period of time and you too can be a powerhouse team.

Now, I am not saying just any one will do. They have to be able to fit your team and the goals laid out for it. They need to be able to provide some tangible benefit to the team. Mentors are the most valuable resource in FIRST. When you find a “good” mentor, they will be able to provide something much more than a bunch of tools, machines, or money would be able to.

Mentors = More Time, Experience, Opportunity, Resources, Students…Better Organization, Strategy, Ideas, etc… It’s really unlimited what coud come out of getting the right mentors involved with your team.

#30

I believe a common thread to consistent high performing teams is that they “take their time” to get to a design decision, and then execute that as absolutely best they can.

Many teams will post that they have a design and are building within a few days of the game announcement. In many ways, that is detrimental.

Take time up front to understand the game itself and the rules. Talk about strategies and how to possibly play the game. Determine the main aspects of the game and then assign a value to them to assist you when making design decisions. Think of a “perfect match” and then decide how much of that you could do. Try to think like a top team, ask yourself “what would team xxx do?”.

Talk about what you want the robot to do, make those decisions, then decide how to make the robot do those things. In many ways, you need to really understand the problem you are trying to solve before you design to solve it.

Once you know what you want to do, work on prototyping the how. Use FTC, VEX, LEGO’s, pipe, cardboard, CAD, whatever to experiment. Then make room (schedule, space, money, resource) for the most important systems and begin to get into details.

This is where you need to then be realistic with your capabilities, resources, materials, budget, etc. Push and stretch, but be honest with what you can really pull off. A good design that is well done and robut will always beat an awesome design that is thrown together.

When talking about the game, try to keep high level for the first part of the discussions. More on this one to follow.

#31

On our team, we do first focus on strategy and what a “difference maker” robot needs to be able to do, and from that we set “need to haves” and “nice to haves.” As much as I like this system and I feel it’s a good way to digest the game, I feel as if sometimes we limit ourselves by making something a “nice to have” because it is hard to implement. From my experience, whether or not our drives team has gotten time to practice with our robot makes a bigger difference than anything else. I joined the team in 2010, which was not a very successful year for us. I saw us finish late and struggle with one feature of our robot the entire season. Our drivers got practically no practice, and therefore we didn’t really succeed at all. However, in 2011 we used known technology from previous years’ robots and made a very successful bot that was SO CLOSE to winning two regionals. The key difference between these years? In 2011 we finished our bot very early (for us) and our drivers got a ton of practice, to a point where it was almost as if they operated autonomously. After seeing how these two years turned out, I hounded the team all year long that it was important to push hard and finish the bot early, because it is a LOT easier to identify problems and fix them at school, with all of the space and resources we needed (not to mention a lot more time). However, there still was an astonishing lack of urgency demonstrated from a good portion of the team. On our team of usually about 35 people, there always only seems to be a group of about 5-7 students who are carrying the team. I want to ask…how exactly do people on other teams get students motivated? Myself, a few other students, and the mentors on our team are constantly drilling urgency, but few ever seem to listen. I’m one of 14 seniors on my team this year, and most of our “key people” are seniors, and I’m thoroughly worried about the condition our team will be in next year. Any insight? How do the powerhouse teams get their students motivated to finish the bot so early?

Also, we seem to have a problem with the idea of a “concept lock,” constantly changing our design way farther into the season that we should. How do the elites know when enough is enough in regards to designing?

#32

I think what everyone has mentioned is true, but I have not seen anyone really mention the fact that most of the power house teams have been around for many years or least has a mentor that has been. They have seen what works and what doesn’t work for many of the tasks.

We are a small team that is 5 years old and by no means a powerhouse, but we learn a little bit more every year. This year we had a ball harvesting mechanism. This is the second bot we have built with one. Lunacy was the first. On Lunacy the team was starting from scratch trying to come up with conveyor material (something that would give tension but not break, have enough traction to pick up balls, stay centered on the rollers….). While the team had a system that harvested balls it took major design time an iteration getting it to work as it was thought up. When the team made it to our regional they saw that many of the powerhouse teams were using polycord belts (something our team didn’t know existed). Guess what, our harvesting system this year had polycord belts and worked beautifully and we got to spend most of our time working on our shooting system, and bridge lowering mechanism not seeing if shelf liner world work better than leather belts, or if rivets or sewing would hold this fabric belt together.

We still have a long way to go to get to the powerhouse level, but every year we learn and get better. It takes a good strategy, design, and execution to get there. We are still at the level where we have to throw out strategies that we do not have to the resources to built in the given time frame, but hopefully we can attract more mentors, sponsors, and eager students to design to the optimum game strategy in the future.

#33

To add to this point, think about this years game. If you began talking about keys to the game, did you say -

“shoot baskets”
“drive up onto the bridge”
“cross the barrier”.

By using those terms, you immediately began to design your robot, by thinking “shooter”, “traction wheels”, “big wheels”, etc. While you may have ended up there with your design, you keep your ideas more open if you think about it like this -

“get balls through the hoops”
“be balanced by the bridge”
“get to the other end of the field”.

By thinking of the key elements in these “higher” terms, you can be more open about the “how” - “how” to get the balls through the hoops (shooter, conveyor, tube system), “how” to get onto the bridge (drive, fly, be carried, crawl up the side), and “how” to get to the other end of the field (drive over barrier, drive over bridge, jump, get pushed, flip, walk).

Some of these examples are a little extreme, but the point is to stay at a high level of discussion early so that you don’t lock your thinking into a design idea too quickly.

#34

Keep in mind that one of the reasons the “elite” teams don’t worry about manufacturing is they don’t have to. Most elite teams have access to sophisticated CNC machinery, which eliminates most difficulties associated with tolerances, weight and manufacturing weird shapes.

In my mind, the major difference between “powerhouse” teams and the rest of us comes from fast machining ability. It’s not like they are all geniuses (or at least not much more so than the rest of teams). They just have more time than the rest of us, more experience than the rest of us, and better tools than the rest of us.

#35

I don’t really know what level of teams you are referring to as “elite” but I think you are really over-estimating the number of teams who have access to these machines and simply “get parts made”.

If you talk to these “elite” teams I think you will find many of them are using basic manual mills, drill presses, lathes, etc. and making a lot of the parts themselves.

#36

To continue your line of thought it’s rarely this easy even if you are getting parts made. We rely quite a bit on sponsors who make us parts and lost well over a week of our schedule when delays started stacking up.

We have access to a CNC mill in our lab and parts don’t just pop out of the machine. It is a very involved and time consuming process to manufacture everything.

#37

I regard a team as “elite” as one that can more or less depend on making it to championships every year.

While there are exceptions to every rule, I have found that many of the high preforming teams in my area either have sponsors that machine a large number of parts for them, or have many CNC type machines that allow them to manufacture complex parts themselves. While I don’t really want to turn this into another “ethics of fabrication” thread, ability to manufacture quickly seems to be a common element in teams that preform at a very high level year after year.

#38

What I think that you are leaving out of your assessment is the recognition of the ability to think and solve problems like an engineer. Skill sets that continue to adjust and adapt to the challenges provided by FRC, continue to fortify the strengths of the teams. The wise use and applications of those skill sets are what you can see missing as a feature on the field. Any field. Pick a field. You’ll see that feature missing.

Jane

#39

I think you may have been generalizing a lot with the “Elite teams have parts made for them” statement, but I’d absolutely agree with you. Whether they make the part themselves via their own equipment, or have a sponsor machine the parts for them, good machining capability can be a staple of making a great robot. If nothing else, it opens doors to new possibilities.

This year, my team experimented with Swerve drive. We never would have been able to fully manufacture a prototype and competition bot without A) our CNC mill to make the modules, and B) one of our sponsors making us the frame. The machining was solid, the programming was a little sketchy, but overall, we had a style of drive train you don’t find on the ‘average’ team. Our machining capability played a huge part in that. And because of that, we can continue to improve it. Should the decision be reached to do so.

I agree, lets not turn this into an ethics of sponsor machining debate, but I have to agree that machining certainly helps. If you have access to CNC machines, laser cutters, water jets, etc. you’ll be able to manufacture components of a higher caliber which, in the end, can lend itself to a higher caliber robot. It’s not necessarily a direct correlation, but I certainly can’t deny that it helps.

#40

Hi-tech machining and fabrication is not the key; it’s the simple act of understanding your capabilities and resources that will separate the high level team from mid level.

A box on wheels with a solid bridge mechanism coupled with drivers with lots of stick time would almost certainly have been a picking team this year or very valuable team to a top alliance.

Also practice, practice, and practice. It’s an axiom that Paul Copioli shared with me during the Overdrive season; a team that builds two simple robots will almost always out perform the best complicated robot with drivers with little practice. We had a bot with lots of potential that year but it needed a lot of time to tune and develop it properly. It was also a little difficult to operate. If we would have had a practice bot that year we would have done much better. After that year we started building two bots and you can see the improvement in our performance.

Our drivers logged at least forty hours of stick time before their first regional and almost an equal amount before the second. Most drivers will never get more than a few hours of stick time every year. Our practice bot broke repeatedly but we learned from that and our comp bot never had a mechanical problem.

Also being flexible during the design process. Our shooter took almost five weeks to develop this year and many on our team wondered if it would even work. We were going out on a bit of a limb. We designed our robot to accept our fling-a-pult but also to use a conventional shooter just in case it didn’t work. I still have the parts for the conventional shooter sitting on my desk at the lab.

The last thing those elite teams have is institutional memory. For example teams that played Aim-High had a huge advantage this year. They didn’t have to develop the knowledge of picking up balls and moving balls through the robot, not as easy as it looks. They also have experimented and developed different drive systems and only need to adapt this knowledge to the new game.