20th October 2023 (Friday)

Firstblog post! Going to be trying to document as much as possible.

Information Limiting the Drive Team

Some Drive Team Philosophy thoughts based on a post from 3847 Spectrum on Chief Delphi.

Some interesting discussion based on this section of the post:

For Remix and Chezy, we stole adopted a rule from 118. Drive team and pit crew were not allowed to know anything about opposing alliances or our own rank throughout the event (except during the strategy meeting, when they could temporarily learn our rank.) We were initially doubtful, but we intend to continue using this rule next season.

It’s an interesting concept to solve a problem that definitely effects the Drive Team. How do you minimize stress on the drive team when matches are difficult/important to rankings? Lots ofstrategy talk here!

Evaluating 3847’s Process

First lets dive into their solution, and look at how 118 also implements their process as well. They provided more detail in this post. Lets see how this fits with 4476’s current processes.

We followed this rule completely. The drive team and pit crew got a censored match schedule, and there was a lot of staring at the ground as we walked past screens.

For drive team, pre-match strategy was nearly identical to how it was without the rule. Our strategy was never really affected by our opponents, especially at Chezy. If an alliance member brought up opponents (which was not often), they just listed off their team numbers and maybe gave a comment on our chance of winning, nothing that affected how we’d play the match. Our operator and I would ignore it or trick ourselves into forgetting which teams they named.

For the strategy/scouting team, pre-match strategy was the same as before. They sent the drive team the same info they normally sent, but without info on our opponents. We trusted they would let us know if there was something we really needed to know about the opposing alliance.

A key element of this implementation is a complete black out of who the opponents of the match are. The goal here is to make sure that the drive team isn’t thinking about things that aren’t in their control, or immediately relevant. Something like a hard match later on in the day, and letting that disrupt their current match performance.

I think that the goal here is good, but the execution drastically contrasts with our current drive team philosophy as well as methods for strategy. To me staring at the ground to not see screens or giving censored match schedules is hard to enforce, and likely to create more anxiety for the drive team, not less. Students are going to likely look at this stuff anyways, and rather than being able to deal with it well out in the open, this hides the problem. The other important thing is I firmly believe that the Drive Coach can’t be left in the dark to the extent that they are currently doing. There are many things that may come up, even in a predominantly fully three offense robot game like 2023 Charged Up where you need to know what your opponents are capable of, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. There were many scenarios even as a top tier robot looking to maximize for 4 Ranking Points every match that well timed bumps in specific places, or good tradeoff with “value” time when playing Defense is essentially impossible to know without careful study and understanding of the opponents from the drive team. It’s also important to have a plan for if something goes wrong in a match, and talking about Strategical Backup Plans, where if a robot malfunctions, then you have an immediate idea of what to do next. Usually this is some sort of defensive idea, where you have priority targets that you want to disrupt.

Defense is specifically brought up in the thread

Even in 2022 during most qual matches we rarely had our partners play defense on a single opponent. With swerve robots robot on robot defense has been less effective in most qual matches in recent years. In 2022 and 2023 for our defense strategies we would try to have a defender play a zone or a line and slow down the entire alliance and not a specific opponent. In those cases our specific opponents don’t matter and our strategy team can let our drive team know they suggest one of our partners play defense without anyone knowing the specific opponent. Often in 2022 instead of playing defense on the opponent robots at all it was better to play defense on the opponents game pieces instead and move them to the far side of the field, etc.

Zone defense is often more important than one on one defense, and is usually more effective. When we describe zone defense however, we always rank each of our opponents from highest priority to lowest priority targets, as there will always be decisions that have to be made when you have to choose a target to focus on. If you don’t have this in place, you simply won’t play as good defense.

Each match in my opinion also has a secondary goal beyond just simply maximizing your own Ranking Points, but also minimizing your opponent’s ranking points as well if possible. Understanding the opponent robots abilities to complete ranking points is critical to denying ranking points from your opponents, which is almost always beneficial to you.

There are also scenarios in a match strategy where you need to go for a “hail mary” esqe play to try to win the match. Usually plans like these revolve around the decision to risk a normal ranking point (RP) to get the two win rps instead. To correctly evaluate situations like this the Drive Coach must understand two fundamental things.

1. Know the context of the current rankings for all robots on the alliance, not just yours.
2. Understand the abilities of both alliances to appropriately judge if the decision is likely to be successful at swinging the match.

The worst possible outcome would be to attempt to swing the match, fail, and drop an extra RP. In this system that 3847 has set up, I don’t believe that we can effectively do some of the things that make us a strong strategic team.

Evaluating 118’s Process

Ethan from 118 also posted their thoughts on how they implement a very similar methodology here.

118 just implemented this for the 2023 Charged Up season, so it’s definitely a new thing for them, and their underlying assumptions make perfect sense to me.

• The drivers’ jobs are hard. Ours must focus on our robot.
• Every extra consideration in a driver’s mind takes away part of their focus on their robot.
• Most qualification matches do not require more preparation than can be done between the prior match and the upcoming one.
• People act differently when they know the consequences of their degree of performance.
• We are fighting to be a high seed in order to control our own destiny as an alliance captain. We always plan for 4RP.

I think the key one that this whole philosophy is trying to address is the variance in performance on the field of the drive team. Their implementation is as follows

• The Flight Crew (drive team) does not look at the match schedule or rankings until after qualifications. In theory, almost no one on the team needs to.
• A whiteboard in our pit displays only match number and bumper color.
• A small crew in Mission Control (strategists in the stands) looks ahead in the match schedule to identify matches which may require more preparation than a normal match turnaround would allow. I.E. a partner robot needs an RP-scoring mechanism fixed or built, or has been losing connection on the field.
• The drive coach is told ranking implications ONLY going into the last match, such as “We need 3RP, or 2RP and 130 points to clinch first seed”.
• Specifically for 2023, as Allen mentioned, we almost never looked at who we were playing against. We’ll keep doing this as long as the game lends itself to triple offense as much as 2023. Coordination between the three alliance members was far more important than even thinking about who you were up against. If a game requires complex interaction with opponents, we will discuss all 6 robots during pre-match, but still not look ahead to any matches other than the one in front of us.
• In elims, we look backward rather than forward. The drive coach maintains and displays a whiteboard with the three alliance members’ individual contributions in each match boiled down to one number. 2023 it was “pieces scored”. Three columns, a row for each elims match. This makes it very clear to all coaches and drive team members where we may be struggling with coordinating, and the direct impact of any changes as soon as we implement them. I started this at district champs this year and found it to be immensely helpful there as well as the Championship and IRI, where every alliance member needed to contribute 7+ pieces per match.

I’ve already covered my thoughts on restricting info to the drive team and how that doesn’t fit with our current outlook on how we execute match strategy. An important distinction is that they tell the drive coach the ranking implications for the last match only. I think this is an error however, as often times the critical match for ranking is not the last match played. We need to objectively identify key matches for seeding, and communicate that to the Drive Team in a way that they can act on it. It doesn’t do us good to give ranking implications for a last match that is either a sure loss or sure win where the actions of our team have much lower impact on the way that rankings may play out.

118 also does discuss all 6 robots for the match, which I do think is important. You can’t ignore your opponents.

The other unique point is looking backwards in elims rather than forwards, and how that has some positives and negatives. It is important to look forward in elims. Playing your own game and being self reflective is a huge part of being successful and consistent in eliminations, especially in the era of double elimination brackets. That being said, you cannot ignore your opponents to the future, especially if you are an underdog alliance. Complex strategic implementations require practice as an alliance, and are often needed to “punch above your weight class” which is something that 4476 regularly does in elims. Far too many times I have created a strategic plan that is strong, but the execution is just not there. Withholding these kinds of strategies to whip out last second usually doesn’t work, it requires all teams to be on the same page and practice these strategies throughout playoffs.

Takeaways

While I don’t think the solutions are right for 4476, the problems still are common amongst all teams. How do you minimize stress on drive team members, andreview what can we do better?

So here is what we do already:

1. Minimize Pit work for drive team, it’s unrelated to driving and adds stress
2. Minimize Strategy interactions/coming up with plans for the match. Everyone is still informed, but they aren’t developing the plans. That’s strat’s job.
3. Take breaks when needed, get food/drinks
4. Put responsibility for the result of the match on the Drive Coach, not the drivers.
5. Have a internal performance first mindset over match or ranking results. We only control our own performance, if we play well and lose, it was a good match.
6. Taking the time to refocus, relax, and talk during stressful situations
7. Positive reinforcement to the drive team members. Making sure that they know the match result is not everything

Things we can improve (Implement for 2024)

1. Doing something fun completely unrelated to robots to disrupt potentially negative thinking
2. Better structure around focusing one match at a time. It’s fine to briefly think about the future, but the now is always more important.

In all honesty i’m not sure what the right solution is. This probably warrants a discussion with the drive team and strat team for more brainstorming

Goals for the Site

I also spent some time thinking about some of the goals for the site. I really want this to be a timeless resource for the team (and other teams if they want it)

The goal for this site is to have a fully comprehensive, searchable resource for all things W.A.F.F.L.E.S. so that we can improve our skills year over year. The whole website is not designed to be a guide for all teams, but a guide for our team and how we do things that other teams can read and take inspiration from for what they think can fit with their systems if they want.

Stuff that’s hosted on the site:

• Design guidelines, how to actually design
• Manufacturing methods and the Tools we use. When you might use some of those tools
• Electrical references for how-tos and referencing schematics
• Solidworks guides on getting set up and following our team’s practices.
• Event & Season Reviews for reflecting on what we did well/need to improve on.
• blog like notes documenting our team’s process, thoughts, for later review and learning what worked and what didn’t.
• Competition Roles documentation, as well as how we actually execute each role, what we care about
• Previous 4476 Robots and learnings from old robots that are easily referenceable so we can learn from past mistakes and successes
• FRC Season Reviews for detailed looks at an FRC season as a whole, what strategies, robots, and mechanisms were dominant and why.

Scouting System

We are also in the middle of overhauling our scouting system for the better. Timelines are tight to be ready with all the core features we want for the STEMly Cup on Nov 4th. It’s a project we started in the offseason of 2022, but never got it really implemented for 2023. Now our goal of course is to get it working for 2023 Stemly at a base level, and add nice to have features for 2024.

I’m sure we won’t get everything implemented that I would like to have, but we do have a subdomain for hosting the site set up now at scouting.wafflesrobotics.com

Brennan