Competition Week 0

Robot 1 chassis getting all our mechanism 2 and 3's

Bag day has come and gone. We haven't been able to touch our competition spec robot, but we have still been working the nights away. Our primary goal was to build up a complete, identical practice robot so that we can continue tuning and practicing. Once our practice bot is finished, we will run the thing into the ground and start learning and applying lessons from all of its failures and successes. This week is also the season of reveal videos as a large number of teams show off their full creations. Our students and mentors alike watch on, seeing how other teams faced the challenge thrown at them this year. Open engineering is spectacular in this regard - 4000 teams, 4000 robots, and though they may share common parts, chances are that each robot has at least one part unique to itself, and no two robots are exactly identical. Each team uses different strategic, manufacturing and/or assembly processes, and each result is different.

Building Up the Practice Bot

In prior years, our practice robot is the first robot built, and a few items are cleaned up by the time we build the second robot. This year we fell so far behind, we had time enough to build a 2 rolling chassis, and then assembled mechanisms on only the one. This week we have continued to push hard and craft a second set of all of our mechanisms to place on our first (second?) robot. This robot will be used for drive practice, software tuning, and starting to look at fixes and upgrades. Our core philosophy for this practice bot is: identical. We know there are several imperfections in the competition robot right now, and some hand-modified parts that were assembled or updated that weren't in the CAD model. Our first job is the update CAD to match the competition bot. Then we re-manufacture parts to make them identical to the first set. (Of course, I have yet another list! Differences between the robots for whatever reason or another.)

There may be one or two minor differences...

The good news is, we've literally built all of the parts before. We have the machine files, we have the knowledge of the pain points and time estimates, so, we can quite accurately re-produce the robot in a short amount of time. The bad news is, it does still take time, and we've missed a hand-wavey deadline to hand off the mechanically complete robot to electrical. However, it will get finished this weekend, then we will have all week to software tune and test, and get some valuable drive practice in. As stated earlier in the year:

A good robot and a great drive team will beat a great robot with an okay drive team.

The ability to constantly train, practice, and get to robot to 99% reliability paid huge dividends to us last year (dividends last year were all around pretty good :-D) Even next year, with no Stop Build Day, we will continue to build 2 robots, they will just be used differently. Our drive team will have full access to one, and our software team will have full access to the other. We'll see how that all plays out next year though. This year we have one bot to share between them.

Reveals and Predictions

<Imagine a picture here of a pile of high school students staring at a TV>

With competition bots all wrapped up, teams are now revealing their efforts in force. A true (sand)storm of videos is hitting Chief Delphi, FUN premier night, and social media. The creative among us will watch these videos and start envisioning new mechanisms to incorporate the best features onto our own. The strategists among us will think about scoring opportunities, defensive weaknesses, and alliance partnership options. The rookies among us will probably either watch and go "wow!" or... stare at their phones and wish everyone else in the room would quiet down. (It's been a long loud few days....)

The CyberKnights have never created an FRC reveal video. Students come in and say "Oh man, we should, that would be awesome!" and then get back to work on the actual robot. Some years (cough) we get so far behind that the only thing we could really film would be the kids on the CAD computers or showing off the inevitable machine/tool breakage. (We had a breaker pop Friday night, caused us about an hours worth of time setting and re-setting back up.) That being said, we usually reveal or robot in our Annual 5th Week Unveiling Ceremony. (Again, not this year, but because of weather! We were fully and totally prepared for the event, and I want to again thank our students for putting so much work into it!) This year, because of the lack of 5th week unveiling, our robot "officially" got revealed on an obscure blog that literally <some> people read.

Between the reveal videos, and the week 0 match events, we can start piecing together a picture of how the game will play during early weeks. We can see which robots have a great baseline formula for the game, and if any big surprises come forth. I have not watched all the reveal videos, but right now my favorite robot is the Barker Robotics machine. Super well thought out, looks easy for the drivers to use, and that climb will give great point density come endgame. One trend I have seen from some of the top teams is maneuverability. Robonauts showed us a skidd-ey slide-y drive that should enable them to break out of defense and score. Team Mean Machine and others have chosen the swerve drive option again for maneuverability. Once true defense starts getting played, we will see which teams have had the most practice dealing with defense, and keeping the most scoring opportunities available. For those teams choosing to play defense - every cycle slowed are points lost for the opposing team. If you can deny access to the only hatch scoring location, you cost that robot a complete cycle as they would have to drop the hatch and fetch a cargo piece. Drive captains will have to devise methods for keeping up to date with scored hatch and cargo positions. One lesson from week zero showed how effective climbing early can be. Alliances have been seen to use the 15 points of a climbing robot and a parking robot to handily win matches, and earn the extra RP. As weeks progress, more game elements will get scored, and wins by climb alone will start to decline. As our first competition is week three, most of our practice effort will be game element cycle drills, and practicing scoring through defense.

Poor guy, 7 weeks and he still hasn't gotten any sleep...

Quote of the Week:

<Me, walks into room>

Student: We're like, less than a minute into Premier night and someone already wrote the 4911 meme!

<Me, walks out of room>

Wait a second...