Kick-Off Preparation

Going to be spending fewer days outside for the next few months...

The most important few days of the season are upon us. I actually just recently had this conversation with my dad over winter break - how do we kick-off? 

Team Goals

It all starts with team goals. These are your driving forces for every downstream decision you should make about your robot, business plan, community service, and so much more. Many teams could have goals like: Be an alliance captain at a regional or district event, or, get to the World Championship! Goals should not be "easy" to achieve, but they should be accomplish-able. There are very few teams in the world who's goals are "Win the World Championship".

For us, we have a pretty established history building competitive robots. In recent years we have been alliance captains at the World Championship, so our robot oriented goal for this year is to once again play on the Einstein field(s). This goal is not easy to accomplish, and it will challenge us to continue our recent form of performance and reliability with this years robot. So, with our target set, how does this prepare us for kick-off weekend?

Power Pyramid

The Power Pyramid

The above image was created by Steph and Evan, taking many useful slides and presentations from others (such as 148, 1114, 1678 to name a few!) and organizing it in what I consider to be a pretty simple and effective graphic. The power pyramid shows where and how resources should be used to increase your robot performance, and rough ideas for where difference tiers exist at competitions.

To understand the power pyramid, think about your robot performance last year (or more!), and start at the bottom layer. Foundations and fundamentals are key to success in any sport. Last year if you were not able to move, or consistently move, or had many reliability issues with electronics and/or radio, focus on those efforts for this year. Just like on this pyramid, once you have the basics nailed down, the only place to go is up! As of this writing - this pyramid is evergreen, going back in time, this can apply to every known FRC game.

I'll try to give a quick summary of each level for you here:

• Basic Mobility - Robot can drive, play defense, has a level of reliability (and a fresh battery!)
• Basic Scoring - Robot can perform a simple scoring action (may not be the fastest, may suffer from defense)
• Basic Autonomous - Robot can perform simple autonomous actions for extra points (drive past the line!)

Quick pause here. For some of the younger or less resourced teams out there, even the above tasks may seem daunting to achieve. I highly recommend checking out the EveryBot that team 118 generally creates every year. They're goals and constraints are to build a robot from almost entirely COTS items for less than $1000. A well-built EveryBot with a lot of drive practice time will be able to perform very well at most district and regional events. 

Also, if you're at this stage - use the kit chassis! It has years of development, and unless you have a very good reason not to, just use it. It will eliminate a number of headaches and allow your team to focus on building the more game specific pieces.

• Intermediate Scoring - Robot has multiple methods of scoring or increased performance in scoring (faster cycle times)
• Operational Proficiency - Drive team has over an hour of drive practice every day. They know the robot, and have proved robot reliability.
• Intermediate Autonomous - Robot uses sensors to perform a consistent autonomous routine, and scores a game object.
• Advanced Scoring - Robot is capable of multiple methods of scoring and has excellent performance in 1-2 objectives. (effective under defense)
• Advanced Autonomous - Robot has multiple available routines and can perform multiple actions in each.
• Elite Scoring - Robot is capable of scoring everywhere, generally the fastest cycle robot on the field (unimpeded by defense)
• Elite Autonomous - Robot has multiple available starting positions, paths and can score multiple objectives from any position or path.
• Operational Mastery - Drive team and robot perform as one, 100% consistency and reliability in every match.

The real secret to the power pyramid, is simply to take one step at a time. If you have a good robot, can perform one scoring method well, have a simple auto, your next step should simply be one or two steps up the pyramid (operating, driving, practicing!). If your robot is having problems scoring a game element, you likely should not be focusing on a multi-scoring path-finding autonomous.

Here's the full presentation: Power Pyramid Presentation

Where do we fit? I'd say we are sorta right in the middle - intermediate autonomous, advanced scoring - somewhere in there. This year we will likely be looking to achieve the same performance, while starting to look toward more iteration and improvement on our scoring systems, building on advanced scoring and advanced autonomous.

How Do We Kick-Off?

So here we are, kick-off has arrived, we have a new game, and two months (ish) to plan, design, build, and prepare. How do we go about this? Some things will be slightly different each year, but the overall concepts are the same. (The timings are given in PST, we know international teams have different amounts of time on kickoff.)

Saturday Morning

Watch the game video! Enjoy the information thrown at us, pay attention to the game video, and any material released. In the morning, we go over the rules in detail. Generally, there are a set of common rules over the course of the years for pinning, entrapment, field damage, etc. Veteran teams can usually skip these sections, though it is good for rookie members to know about. The game rules will specify zones on the field, game elements, control-able game pieces, scoring opportunities, game specific penalties, human player interactions, and (usually) additional ranking point bonuses.

2019 Saturday Kick-off moment

In previous years, we have had team-wide general discussion about the unique rules of the game. This year, we will either use a pre-compiled test from Chief Delphi, or create our own rules test for all students to take.

Saturday Lunch

Rules test! Every member of the team needs to understand the rules in order to aid in productive discussions in the afternoon. If folks are not clear on the rules, time gets used when looking at point scoring or other strategies to clarify. (Naturally, we often still reference the rules during strategic discussion, but at least everyone will start at a roughly equal base knowledge.)

Saturday Afternoon

Now comes the discussion that will shape the rest of the season. Breaking down the game, identifying base robot actions, and building the first iteration of your game-play strategy. This discussion will generally use knowledge of previous games for estimation purposes, and will rely purely on answering "what" not "how".

We start by listing all methods by which you can score points. We use that to calculate a theoretical maximum score for a single robot and a full alliance. This is where we start to use some historic knowledge and inferred "guesswork" to theorize scores for a week 1-2 event, a week 4-5 event, DCMP event, and CMP event. This helps drive our strategy if we have a reasonable target for points we will need to achieve at certain levels of play.

<About this time I realized I haven't taken pictures of our whiteboards for the past two kick-offs...>

Once we have all of our scoring settled, we start to look for the cycles, point ceilings, Ranking Point bonuses, and unique scoring opportunities (think- endgame climbing). Once again, we go through history to identify reasonable cycle times, how many cycles to earn the respective points from the previous exercise, and difficulty differences for earning RP bonuses.

At this point, we have a rough outline where all sentences sound like "to meet a week 4 estimated score, we need to complete 8 cycles and achieve the end-game climb". Now we break that down into specific robot actions to perform the scoring options. Robot must acquire the game piece. To achieve cycle times, robot top speed must be greater than 10 feet per second. Again, specifically answer the "what" questions, without asking "how". (E.g. - don't say the robot will use an elevator to score in the high goal. Say the robot must score the game piece in the high goal.)

Saturday Evening

In our forming years (1-3) we wrapped up Saturdays having completed the above - list of scoring options, max scores, theoretical scores, and lists of robot actions. The past 2 years, we finished those exercises in record time and continued onto the next phase: building our initial strategy. Combining the score calculations with the robot actions, and prioritizing those actions to create your robot requirements.

For CyberKnights, one lesson we learned from 2015 was that we are capable of building solid robots and controlling our own destiny. We aim to be a high-performing robot on our alliance, achieving a solo bonus Ranking Point if possible, and/or highly contributing to 4-RP matches. (Which sets us up for success in our team goal - playing on Einstein field.) In general, our priority list will look like:

0. Schedule - build the thing, drive the thing, break the thing (in the workshop!)
1. Robot action that scores/assists in easy RP - at a minimum, we should aim for 3 RP every match, starting week 1
2. Robot action for high scoring - fast cycle bot, touch-it-own-it acquire, slam-it-score-it deposit
3. Robot actions for difficult RP - As play ramps up, we need to earn as many 4 RP matches as possible

This is about where we expect to end Saturday. First take of robot requirements, first take of game-play strategy. One note on our strategy, is that we are always going to be 1 robot on an alliance of 3. When we make our plan, we will often make assumptions about our alliance partners, but we really have no control over them. With our basic strategy and robot requirements, we focus on aspects of the game that our 1 robot can accomplish.

Sunday Midday

Day 2! We usually start halfway through Sunday, allowing us all a good sleep after the craziness of Saturday. Often, (and again this year) we invite local teams to come out, challenge our thoughts and assumptions from Saturday, and play-test the game.

We have a large carpeted auditorium where we tape out the field, tape out scoring zones, and "play" the game. I've been on teams where students roll around on chairs to act as robots, in the past we've had students run around playing robots. This year, we are fortunate to have a few robots in driving condition, so we will have robots... play robots? While they may not be able to interact with the new games pieces, they will help validate the guesswork on cycle times, field spacing, and the impact of defense.

Taping the cargo ship from 2019

We will use this time to validate our primary strategy, but also run different combinations for alliance strategies - e.g. permutations of all-offense robots, 2 offense + 1 defense robot, 3 unique characteristic robots, etc. One fun thing we can start blue-sky thinking about in this stage is: how will the elite teams play this? Will they prioritize autonomous scoring? Will they have an elite scoring feature to boost their end-game points? What would a 118, 148, 3310 alliance look like? (Would 118 change into black shirts? These are important questions...)

Sunday Afternoon

After the fun and games of "playing" the new game, we will look at and evaluate how our robot requirements stack up to what we experimented. This may shift a priority or two around (hopefully lower down the order!).

By the end of Sunday, we should be able to have another nights sleep on our current final robot requirements list. We can now start pondering old games and old robots for mechanisms to look into, prototype, iterate on, ... steal...

Kick-off weekend is the single most important weekend in build season. Breaking down the game, selecting robot actions, and creating your prioritized robot requirements list will shape the remaining build and competition season for the year. We cram a TON into these 2 days. Other teams may take more time (some might take less!!??), but it's important at this stage of the process that all team members know the team goals, robot goals, and are all roughly on the same page. With the robot requirements (mostly) set - the engineering and packaging can begin.

I hope there's enough detail and variety in the description above that can help your team, no matter where your team is on the pyramid. Build what you know, challenge yourself a little more each year, help the teams around you, and we'll see you at the competition!

-B