-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Strategy: Build Season
Strategy is important because it is the main key to success. You can have a mediocre robot but a good strategy and still have a successful competition. Strategy can be strategy for the build season and it can be strategy for the competition. This page will mainly focus on strategy during the build season.
The following information comes from a FRC team 125's power point presentation mixed with what 6201 does for strategy. Our team does not follow this exactly, however 6201 does follow some of these steps such as 2 to 4.
Remember: These steps can feel tedious at times but make sure everyone understands what is going on during this step, since it is important. It will help the team be on the same page.
- Use your goals
- Understand the game manual
- Detailed Scoring Analysis
- Outline Robot Skills
- Detail Time based Analysis
- Robot & Alliance Conceptualization
- Understand your Capabilities
- Strategize
- Group decisions
Make sure your goals are SOLID and have buy-in across the team. Your goals should be reach type goals but are achievable for your team.
Read the manual. The game manual basically has all the information you need to fully understand the game. The game manual also tells you information on what is and what is not allowed on a robot. Therefore, reading it is very important
Group discussions can be productive but solo work is required Try to parse out the strategies that are not allowed, unproductive. Write down unknown questions and help each other understand
Review the scoring details that are in the game manual. Then use that to list all the ways a robot can score points. List all ways to score points in a clear and organized fashion.
Our team has done this many times in previous season and found it very useful. We create a google sheet and as a team, we go through the game manual and list all possible ways a robot can score points.
Outline robot skills is when the team creates a list of everything a robot could do on the field to complete the game task. Then identifies which skills are required for which task.
On 6201, this step is done during or the day after step 3.
Determine 1st pass realistic point thresholds for various robots. Using the information from step 3. Detailed Scoring Analysis and step 4. Outline Robot skills, create 1st pass realistic point threshold for various actions.
This step can help the team start to understand what different alliances may look like. Also how robot concepts can and can not compliment each other.
Determine what alliance and robot does well and wins. Group brainstorm various robot concepts. Remember to focus on what the concepts will do, not how. All robot strategies and concepts should be should be analyzed and make sure they are allowed.
Use the previously lists that the team created as your robot task menu. Try to simulate how a match will play out. Think about what type of robot beats another, and what type of robot is #1 seed robot. Also try to find out what a winning alliance could look like, and what can your team do be apart of that alliance
Align on a commonly understood set of abilities your team has, and doesn’t have. Save really complex ideas that the team does not have time to complete for the off-season. There are many ways to complete the same task. Just because one team did something one way and it worked, that doesn't mean your team can do the same thing.
Objective: Understand what types of robots will exist on the field. Decide what approach your team will take. With concepts narrowed down, and capabilities agreed upon, its time to finalize a strategy List which tasks each of your robot concepts needs (ex: gear bot vs fuel bot) Remember, some of your concepts require specific actions completed in certain amounts of time The end result will be a list of tasks each specific robot will accomplish
Design for Simplicity
- Utility Mechanisms
- One mechanism, Multiple uses
- Cool Factor
- Was it worth it?
- Often not.
- More times than not, the BEST robots are the simple, effective ones.
- Focus on core aspects:
- Simple
- Reliable
- Understood the game to exceptional levels
- Focused on COTS items where possible
- Used custom parts to enhance features
- Well driven
- Practice! Practice! Practice!
- Robots need to be done with enough time to allow practice
- Minimize the useless wasted time
- Make Design Sacrifices
- Better to be great at 1 thing than okay at 3
There are a few things that should be figured out way before your competition. Drive team should be figured out sooner than later so you can start driver practice early. Driver practice is very important! You can have an amazing robot but if no one can drive it well, your team wouldn't do well. Driver practice is not only for the driver, it is also for your operator. An operator is a second driver that doesn't drive, it controls another part of the robot such as an intake or an outtake or a climber. It should be figured out who is the operator sooner than later as well so they can get practice.
Even though we have survived competitions without scouting, it is still very important and how scouting is going to work during a competition should be figured out. In the past we have created a sheet that scouters fill out during a match and once the match was done, they gave the paper to someone who would take that info and put it in a spread sheet. In recent years, we did group scouting with The Green Alliance. However that wasn't available to us in 2020 so we just made up a list which wasn't the best way of creating a pick list but it was something.