Maximizing Week 1

Allen Gregory, Mary Nguyen, Jakob Wittry, Emilio Parra

Maximizing Week 1

Goal: In the first 11 days of the season we want to decide on the architecture of our competition robot that gives us the best opportunity to win DCMP and Einstein.

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• The season is a marathon not a sprint, you don’t have to know what your robot is going to do or look like on day 1.

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• Finding the right architecture is the first step to a competitive robot.

Architecture

• A list of mechanisms needed to accomplish the game tasks
• the model/sketch of how each mechanism will interact with each other
• Rough space claims for each mechanism
• Don’t have to fully solve the packaging problem but big picture needs to be there.
• A general concept of how each mechanism will be able to accomplish its task.

Maximizing Week 1

• Preparing before Kickoff
• Kickoff Day
• Field Build
• Prototypes
• Understanding the Game (Strategy)
• Decision Points

Preparing before Kickoff

• Do as much preparation as you can before kickoff, training, tools, organization, materials, field materials, clean, recruit, etc.
• Prototyping equipment

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• Make a plan, assume the plan will change a lot

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• Make as many decisions as possible before kickoff (assume some of them will change)

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• Study past games and robots

Kickoff

• READ THE RULES and more importantly TALK ABOUT THE RULES

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• Do whatever you need to get students engaged and understanding the game

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• DON’T TRY TO DESIGN THE ROBOT ON DAY 1

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• Identify some initial robot/strategy Trade Offs and potential features/abilities

Trade Offs

• Kathick’s Effective FIRST Strategies goes over this.
• Architectures are combinations of these trade off choices.
• Keep adding to the list during the week
• We don’t make a will/won’t

list

Spectrum’s Day 1 Trade Off List

Field Build

Build as much of a field as possible as soon as possible

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• If that means masking tape on a wall, or pvc pipe. Get something that you can test with and make it as real as your resources allow (space, money, people, time, etc)

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Day one Speaker

Day Two Speaker

Day Five Stage

Day One Amp

Prototypes

• Goal of Every Prototype: Increase the understanding of something about the game or about your robot/materials for someone on your team.
• We have a whole other presentation on prototyping.

Day Four Roller Prototype

Day Five Climber Prototype

Day Eight Intake Prototype

Understand the Game

• READ and TALK about the rules some more. The whole week!
• Re-evaluate your trade off and feature lists
• Watch the Field Tour Videos, look at the real field drawings and CAD models
• Think about how the game is going to be played at a high level.
• You’re making educated guesses.
• Build up sketch game elements
• Sketches for the critical field dimensions and robot rule dimensions (height limits)
• Read Build Blogs, Watch Ri3D, Everybot, and every other resource.
• Assume all of these resources understand the game imperfectly but still learn what you can from them.

Decision Points

• What do you need to see or know to confirm your assumptions?

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• What do you need to test to be able to decide on an intake, a climber, or a full architecture?

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• Be working rapidly towards your first decision points.

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• When is a prototype good enough that you know you can iterate and optimize it to make it world class in the next 7+ weeks?

Things we Don’t Do

• VOTE - Absolutely not
• Weighted Decision Matrix
• Decide on a design too early