We're Done, Redux!

Boop... boop... ... boop!

And, that's a wrap. For real this time! Our robot skills challenge videos for 2021 are submitted, the "official" season with the robot has come to an end.

One final, last time, I promise - what a strange year. No competition, no fanfare. With a middle of the day Thursday deadline, we basically had a Slack post saying "Grats, we submitted!", and with that, the season was over.

What a year though - so proud of the students, mentors, school, and well, most of humanity anyway. Great job CyberKnights, I believe it is now naptime.

Chasing Numbers

At this point we had come to identify the lead protagonist for our group was likely going to be 6328 Mechanical Advantage. We also had the benefit that they had an open build season and shared a lot of their information on Chief Delphi, so we had constant feedback on where we needed to aim for our scores.

With the limited time remaining, we would not be able to complete all five tasks. We quickly scrapped the Galactic Search routines as that would require extra work from software. With our tiny robot and our focus on navigating and shooting, this made the most sense from our robot priorities point of view. Selecting the second opt-out challenge was a bit more difficult - we were pretty confident we could deliver a high score in Power Port, as well as a perfect score in Interstellar Accuracy. Interstellar Accuracy was an interesting challenge - it was the only one that had a maximum achievable score. If we chose this task, the best we could do is equal the score of 6328. Given they were posting scores for every challenge and we wouldn't be - we couldn't win the group if we tied their score.

Constantly evaluating our targets.

We focused all our efforts on Hyperdrive, Autonav, and Power Port.

We had been building paths for Autonav during the robot bring-up, so we started there, taking each routine one by one until we tuned and tweaked to get a faster time than was currently posted.

Our driver then was given the challenge to meet or exceed all our Autonav times. Time was against us though, and with only three nights where we needed to capture both Hyperdrive and Power Port, we missed out on our targets for Hyperdrive. (Yep, software was faster then our human driver. They're going to have to keep that up next year!) Power Port suffered the same issue as Hyperdrive - lack of time. Coupled to some issues with the LimeLight targeting, we missed our goals for this challenge as well.

Looking back now, we spent a considerable amount of time running the Autonav paths - while we met our goals, we may have lost the forest for the tree's on that one. We did not give our driver the appropriate time with the robot, nor did we spend enough time working with the LimeLight. But also reflecting back, would it have been worth changing with challenge we performed, knowing that Autonav was not where we wanted the scores to be? 

Submissions

Most of Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent getting our Autonav routes. Tuesday we got our first recordings of Power Port, and some of the Hyperdrive routes. We found a few mechanical issues - Falcon motor on one of our swerve modules was loose - then set up brand new tread on all four wheels for the final Wednesday showing. We recorded more routines for Power Port, and a complete set of Hyperdrive paths.

Double checking that we had everything for the submission.

Thursday morning we got the final information on the videos we submitted.

Autonav: 23.2 seconds

Hyperdrive: 42.4 seconds

Power Port: 59

Overall, we were (tired! but) pretty happy with the final scores. We knew we wouldn't win the group, but thought we would still place well with these scores. 

What Comes Next?

We wait for the scores, duh!

(Almost) All the bots, sitting/napping together.

But actually, like the end of every normal season, it's time for a nap. A few days off to recharge and focus on the other parts of life we may have been procrastinating on during the last few weeks. Over the next few weeks we'll come back together, likely in a remote setting, and do our post-season debrief. This important set of meetings will help us understand our performance this season. Did we meet our goals? Did we focus on the correct strategic elements? For items that we performed well, what tools or processes enabled us to perform well? For areas where we can improve, what actionable steps can we take to make improvements? All this we be discussed and documented, then hopefully referenced at the start of next season.

After that comes the end of the school year and summer. Our one last hurrah of the season will be our annual Unveiling event, virtual this year. Following that comes lab cleaning,  recruitment, lab cleaning, summer training, some light lab cleaning, outreach events, and maybe sneak another nap in at some point, after cleaning the lab. My personal opinion and hope though, is that the state of the region and the world will improve such to the point that we can have an in-person off-season event come the Autumn, and a full onsite official season in 2022.

Random Musing of the Week

We survived! 

What a strange season. Again. But so many kudos to FIRST and the teams. The world changed, and we all had to quickly change with it. Though the outcome was not quite known when we started, we accomplished something. FIRST is about preparing students for the future - and this year was a great lesson.

Human beings generally do not adapt well to stark changes, yet this year we all had accept that things would be different, and we would have to try new things. New processes, new methods of communication. New ways to approach building a robot, or an entirely different type of challenge. Once we accepted that we had to approach the problem from a new angle, we were able to push forward. In an educational program - that is a solid success.

See you all next year, 

-B