Tips to make your team a contender?

FIRST General Forum
#33

I personally have believed this would make an excellent book. Several years ago, I read Built to Last and thought it would be wonderful for someone to do a study on FRC (or FSAE of Mini-Baja…).
While 10,000 hrs. is on the verge of doable (that is 5 years of working a full time job of 40 hrs/wk), I think that sustainability is likely more about getting a lot of members on a path to 1,000 hours. While and order of magnitude less “experience”, it is not an order of magnitude of less “goodness” that the individual can offer.

A discussion on practice driving:
For those that are interested in watching the progression, grab some new students and have them drive the robot. The first 10 minutes to 1 hour are them basically figuring out the controls. After about 10 hours of active practice, the driver/operator likely get to the “good” level. Around 100 hours of active practice, your drive team should be very very good. In an FRC season, it is hard to get much past 100 hours of practice (not impossible, but very hard).
This is not much different than with video games. The first time a person plays a new type of video game that they have never played that style, their talent is the biggest contributor to initial success. Once they get around 10 hours of play time, most can do a pretty good job of handling the character and moving about the board/world/game space. Around 100 hours, the player is likely to be considered very skilled relative to outsiders, but still a long way from an expert. Around 1,000 hours, they should be incredibly proficient (though experts will still likely be considerably better).
Between that 100-1,000 hour mark, they can switch to a different game of a similar genre, and will likely start out relatively good, and have initial progress that is much more rapid.

This is much the same with CAD, design Calculations, strategic analysis, fabricating parts…

#34

The best thing you can do is understand the game well, and build well within your means. Strive to work smarter, not harder. Make a priority list and stick to it like the law. Have fun. Keep organised.

Do these things and the rest will come. Don’t jump too far into the practice robot camp before you seriously evaluate not only your financial situation (the thing that everyone things about) but your ability to actually make that second robot during the season (the thing that few people talk about). I have seen far too many teams have “practice robots” that the team is too busy fixing/getting ready/building two robots at a time that no practicing actually gets done. Not only do they not practice, it hinders the competition robot as less time is devoted to it. Be very careful with them. That being said, if you can do it, it’s a huge asset.

#35

Play practice match 1. Build a robot that can play practice match 1. A good robot that was finished on practice day will always lose to a mediocre robot that played in practice match 1. If you can get into that match, in most cases you will be able to play at least 4-5 matches back to back without waiting on the filler line. If you do that you’ll be head and shoulders above every team that was working in their pits back then. This means that you should design a robot you can bag completed. Charge your batteries before practice day. Plan hour to hour what you’re going to be doing and when you’re going to be inspected. Finally, don’t forget to program your radio.

Note: if you can get inspected really quickly there won’t be a wait to get an inspector.

#36

Understand your resources. Know your limits, your weaknesses, your strengths, and potential opportunities in all aspects of your team. Your students, mentors, build space, sponsors, local community, finances, and your team experience are just a few aspects of your team that can impact your performance as a team. With the 2015 season still fresh in your mind sit down as a team and discuss how the year went. What did you do right? What did you do wrong? What didn’t you capitalize on? What parts of your team do you see as a strength moving forward? What parts of your team do you see as a weakness? What steps can we take between now and kickoff to better prepare ourselves?

Get the robot done and practice, practice, practice and don’t be afraid to iterate mechanisms to improve your performance. Constant improvement is needed to stay competitive with the game if you come out in week 1 swinging.

#37

Our neighbor FRC team, 1912 Team Combustion, refers to these three components as their “Combustion Triangle”. (Though as I recall it’s sponsors rather than money, but that’s a subtle distinction.)

#38

Thanks! You guys have been awesome the past couple years when we’ve been at the same events. That’s awesome you got to the championship.

#39

While it wasn’t something Karthik said directly at his Effective Strategies presentation last week, two pieces of what he said engaged in some promiscuous correlation.
Key pieces in making a high-scoring robot are:

  • execute plenty of “game cycles”
  • spend a lot of time building and trying things
  • be ready to toss an idea when another works better

These ideas combine into the concept of “innovation cycles” - how many times during build season can you go through the various engineering cycles:

  • redesign (back to the drawing board)
  • major update (rebuild nearly or completely from scratch)
  • minor update (rebuild a component, whether a single piece or subassembly)
  • tweak (minor modification of a component)
  • tune (adjustment of a component)

That is, I have to think that the speed with which you make each engineering cycle (while being sufficiently thorough, of course) increases the value of each hour spent in the design and build process.

#40

At the same time though, you don’t want to be tweaking so much that your drive team never gets to actually, you know, drive the robot.

“Hang on guys… I just want to try adjusting this one other thing over here…”

#41

I note that Karthik also brought up the 10,000 hour myth in his talk on Wed. night. Several authors, including David Epstein in the “Sports Gene” show that Malcom Gladwell was incorrect in developing his anecdotal assessment about needing 10,000 hours to be successful. Experience is very helpful, but there are means of shortcutting it.

#42

Not as subtle as you might think. Nurturing sponsors means that money arrives on a continual basis. Sponsors also can deliver much more than money, including publicity, mentors, community and other support. Never think of your sponsors as “money.” Make them integral to your community.

#43

I think the anectdote makes more sense when you think about an example like someone just practice hitting the ivories on a piano for 10000 hours alone and can become really good at it. Doing FRC for 10000 hours independent of other things can probably still make one person really good at it, but leaning on the processes of other people and getting a relevant education or listening to talks like the strategy discussion can take the hours to mastery count down a lot.

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#44

The point stands though, whether or not the quantitative metric is correct - if you want to be good at something, you need to spend a lot of time with it. Learning, practicing, improving, talking, teaching, competing. The more you do the more proficient you become.

#45

Practice is indeed how you get to Carnegie Hall.

#46

I don’t dispute it, I was just highlighting shortcuts. There are teams in FRC that are not just powerhouses, they are incubators. A good analogy here is The Daily Show. It takes people with potential, puts them through a proven process, then catapults them to success in a future project. It’s possible Stephen Colbert could have hosted the Late Show without ever working on the Daily Show, but that kind of environment is very beneficial.

I think someone on 1678 said it best that they can’t replicate the great mentors on the team, but they can replicate the processes those mentors work through and educate their students on it.

#47

Epstein’s point actually was that Gladwell misinterpreted the piano proficiency data. In our case, I believe “thinking smart,” which is really Karthik’s message, can overcome hours of work. Yes driver practice is important, but having a talented driver with 3-D spatial awareness is even more so.

#48

I think that’s what it boils down to. You either have the talent, or if you don’t, you just practice. Some people are just naturally good at things, but for those of us who aren’t, best we can do is practice.

Age old quote: practice makes perfect. (For most cases, it’s a bit of both, especially as practice can really bring out and refine the talent.)

#49

Don’t think inside the box. By that I mean, don’t design your robot around the robot crate height to the Champs. I know a lot of teams who did that this year, mine being one. Keep the crate size in mind, but don’t prioritize it.

#50

That’s what we did. Our robot was definitely taller than a crate could hold. The only change we made was to bolt rather than weld the lift frame to the drive frame, so we could take it apart to fit a crate. It did make Saturday night at Bayou a bit of a challenge, as we didn’t want to count on getting special permission to re-bag and we hadn’t drilled the holes necessary to make the robot stable in a “crate configuration” until after finals. We were one of the last teams out of the venue, but we did beat getting the field into the truck. A bunch of our students helped pack up the game elements, so the Bayou folks cut us a bit of slack - and we took home a commemorative used pool noodle and a nice length of slightly used blue carpet as well as a bit of lagniappe.

#51

I saw a few teams with two stage lifts that avoided that problem this year, as well as some whose tops could come off (once during a competition; whoops) in order to fit in the crate.

Not thinking inside the box can work beyond just height limitations. If you’re a low resource team, and you choose to follow what Ri3D teams make, or base your robot off of existing mechanisms (ie a nerf disc gun in 2013), you run the danger of not being able to replicate it. I saw many teams in 2014 with the El Toro style collectors who had more trouble than teams with scoops- some couldn’t even collect with it. if you instead conceptualize your own design, prototyping if possible, then you have tested it to make sure it works. Then you consult things like Ri3D for inspiration as to how to improve your mechanisms. this year especially many teams that are usually not that great came out of nowhere with brilliant designs, things that weren’t even close to what Ri3D made, even some designs I never saw closely replicated anywhere else.

#52

There have been a lot of folks saying great things but I really think that for most teams there are 3 keys to making competitive robots:

  1. learning how to design & fab strong, light structures without having access to high end equipment (for #246 you’d be surprised of how much of our robot was made from 1/16" wall angle and 1/16" rectangular tube using only a drill press, a height gauge to scribe parts and a band saw).

  2. leaning how to interface COTS parts to those structures (for #246, that largely meant using Versaplanetaries galore, 1/2" hex shaft + hex bearings, and chain, chain, chain & more chain – did I mention that I like chain?)

  3. learning how to stay within the capabilities of YOUR TEAM. It doesn’t matter what Cheesy Poofs or Killer Bees or Miss Daisy can do. It only matters what YOUR team can do. Look at every game with benefit of hind sight. Without fail, you can find a simple robot that your team could have made if you had committed to that design, completed it early and gotten your coders and drive team the time they needed to get good.

Dr. Joe J.