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The Season

Dun, dun, dun. Out of the two parts of robotics (meetings and tournaments), this is the second best! We’re going to take all of what you learned previously and bundle it into an entire season. Use common sense and logic. I’d say that there’s as much thinking through problems as there is applying the previously taught material. This section is divided into 4 sections designed to mimic the natural progression of a season. If you learn this with a team, your senior members will do this out of habit, although there are some tricks that they might not know. If you don’t learn this with a team, try to find people to bounce ideas off of since all activities work better with collaboration. If you’re with a team but you don’t have any seniors to help you, follow this guide to learn the ins and outs.

Pre-Reveal

This is a very boring but very important part of the brainstorming season. For new members this step is impossible to do, although it helps to listen to senior members. Get ready to start the season.

Lessons Learned

Last season we did this but didn’t do that. We saw other teams do this when we did that. We did this and other teams did this too. The first thing you want to do when approaching a season is reflect on your past season. Here’s a list of pros and cons of things you’ll want to consider:

  • Building
  • Coding
  • Driving
  • Tournaments

Make sure to think of good and bad things that happened regarding each of these and think of what you as a team can do to improve. Your leader should take your team through this exercise and ensure that your team is able to grow. Your notebooker should take notes on what you discussed, and then organize it into a write-up that shows progression. Everyone should talk about what they saw, even if they aren’t the lead person of that role (i.e. a coder can talk about building, even if they aren’t the lead builder). Lead persons should take special consideration into what they saw in how people worked together in the respective role and how they will lead their role better.

In this section you may also want to consider non-robotics issues such as:

  • Inter-team interactions
  • Intra-team interactions
  • Coach and parent interactions

Also think about how you worked as a team. These things could be interesting to talk about if you want to tear each other's throats out. Think about things that you and others did well or didn’t do well. This will either lead to a better team or different teammates, both are improvements. Anything that you think needs to be said should probably be said. This is the time to get everything off your chest.

Meetings

Since this is the beginning of the season, it’s also a good time to plan out meetings. See what day you all will be able to make a meeting. I like having 2 meetings a week although many times we can only get 1. At this time you should also plan your next few meetings which include:

  • Watch parties for the reveal
  • Reveal discussion
  • Post-reveal discussion

We’ll go more in-depth later, but make sure to have meetings set up since these next few meetings determine a lot of what you do for the rest of the season.

Reveal

The most fun part of your brainstorming season. Get a bunch of friends together, watch some live stream, yell at said live stream, cry that the game is so bad, then start designing the best robots this side of the Mississippi has ever seen while mumbling under your breath “this game sucks.” Got a bit too realistic there.

Watch Parties

Watch parties are lots of fun and really important. Work with other teams for this as more input is better. Many times, most of the club will get together and participate. Other times we send someone to spy on the state server to hear ideas. Some teams even stream their watch parties. I’ll go through the steps of a watch party.

Get Together

Have someone organize the watch party. VEX says when they will do the live stream of the new game, so planning around that is important. If you aren’t able to make the specified time, you can still participate afterwards.

Watch It

Get together in person or on social media, and gather a bunch of materials (below). Watch the VEX live stream. Bring some snacks too, pretzels are always nice because there’s no dust left on any papers you bring. Materials:

  • Phone and laptop
  • Printer and graph paper (about 5 of each per person)

Your notebooker should also take notes about what happened during the watch party. If your team has taken notes about the game, they’ll be grateful.

Understand the Game

After you watch the game, you’ll want to dive right into designing your robot. But, it’s important that everyone understands the game first. Things to do to understand the game:

  • Watch the video multiple times
    • Think about the important parts, there’s a lot of fluff in the videos
  • Read the game manual -It’ll be on the VEX website
    • It’s a very long document, but you should learn the rules in it
  • Explain the game to others
    • Teaching others will help you understand the game better too

You should understand the game to see what your robot can and can’t do. Your notebooker should also understand the game as writing up the game is an important part of the notebook.

Post-Reveal

This is where robotics really starts. Your team should still be together, and this should occur right after you’ve watched the reveal. Another suggestion is for each person to create their own ideas for each bolded section then come together and share. Put your bad ideas cap on because we want every single one of them. For legal reasons, that was a joke, please give good ideas.

Identifying Objectives

You’ve watched the reveal and you understand the game semi-perfectly. First you need to break the game down. Identify these or more:

  • Offensive strategies
  • Defensive strategies
  • Scoring strategies
  • Descoring strategies

Make sure each person understands each strategy. Everyone should also be thinking about how these strategies play into building, coding, and driving the robot.

Solving Objectives

This is a very long section. This is your brainstorming section for notebookers. There are a lot of different categories to discuss and a lot of ideas in each one. For this section especially, have everyone go into separate rooms to create their ideas. Once everyone’s done, come together and discuss.

Categories

You may want to add other categories depending on what the game calls for.

  • Scoring mechanism
  • Descoring mechanism
  • Drivetrain type (H, X, U)
  • Wheel types

Ideas

I can’t cover each idea in each category, since I don’t know what game you’ll use this for, but I can talk about the general way to formulate ideas. Make sure to draw and write out your examples.

  1. Think really hard about the category you’re working on
  2. Think about what you did the previous year (if it applies)
  3. Do a small pro/con about it
  4. Repeat for designs that you’ve seen other teams use
  5. Repeat for designs that you’ve seen in previous games
  6. Repeat for designs you just made up
  7. Think about how each idea affects the current game

I’ll do one for drivetrains:

  1. We used an H-Drive last year
  2. Pro: really fast in a straight line, Con: didn’t turn very well
  3. Other teams used X-Drives
  4. Pro: turned really well and was fast, Con: was easy to push
  5. Theoretical is the U-Drive (front-end H-Drive, back-end X-Drive)
  6. Pro: better turning, Con: different speed wheels may have a negative effect
  7. Maybe you think this game will be played without as much defense, so you can use an X-Drive since it’s Con won’t affect too much.

Once your team has formulated all their ideas, regroup and share them. Talk about each pro and con and write them up into one sheet per idea.

Scoring Solutions

Decide on one method to score solutions, some popular ones are below:

  • Democracy - Each person votes for the best design
  • Rank the Designs - Each person ranks all the designs and assigns points to them. When totaled, whichever has the most is chosen
  • Lead - Either the leader or lead builder chooses what they think is best
  • Scoring - The entire team assigns a point value to each design, the highest is chosen

You’ll want to decide on your top 1 or 2 ideas from each category. You may need to rebuild portions of your robot, so having a semi-developed idea to fall back on is useful. Remember to think about how each design influences the game. Use your pros/cons to guide you. Some designs may affect designs in a different category, so you’ll want to think about that. Once you’ve narrowed your selection, choose the ones you’ll start building with. You may want to look to the lead builder for this. If you think the chosen design is a mistake, talk it out a bit more. You’re early enough in the season that you can flesh out plans and not have it hurt.

Meetings

Once you’ve decided on your top design for each category, your next move is to start building, coding, and driving. Even though each section has its own specialties that will be broken down below, the following is true for all of them. You need to repeat the engineering design process (EDP). If you aren’t familiar with the EDP, it says that you create something, test it, analyze the results, and improve it. So if you build a drivetrain using chain, you then code it, then drive it. Let’s say that your sprockets are slipping, you deduce that the problem is your chain is too loose. You improve it by removing links. Since nothing can be perfect, at the end of a cycle, you will have to move on to another piece of your robot. It’s as important to see everything as a whole as it is to see it separately.

Start of the Meeting

The leader should have a plan for what they want completed during each meeting. Try not to be late, so you don’t miss the plan. If you’re the lead builder, coder, or driver you may also have specific plans of what you want to do. Once everyone understands what needs to be done, the respective people start on their tasks.

Middle of the Meeting

This is when you get to work on building, coding, and driving. At the beginning of the season, your meetings will most be building. The middle will be coding. The end will be driving. Obviously there will need to be small build or code fixes along the way, and the driver will need to test some mechanisms out, but that is the general flow.

Building

With your designs decided on, you’ll need to start somewhere. I recommend starting with CAD. You can CAD out specific subsystems and then build them up to create your entire robot. CAD is very nice since they act as exact blueprints. The lead builder would most likely do the CAD with other builders helping. You can also start with graph paper and drawing out 2D designs. Even though it isn’t ideal, you can draw out drivetrains and other simple mechanisms. Build the drivetrain first and then build the rest of your robot piece-by-piece. After each part is built, get it coded and tested and then improve it. Large-scale rebuilds are another important part of building. You may see that you need to rebuild after going to a tournament and realizing that your robot doesn’t hold up. Or you may realize that a design doesn’t work for reason X while designing it. Don’t be afraid to rebuild large parts of your robot, just make sure you have enough time to. You may have to start at square 1, but having a solid starting point is key.

Coding:

After a part is built by the build team, you want to code the controls immediately. Coding for driver control does not take very much time and can be done even if the rest of the robot has not yet been built. You should always try to code basic controls while the rest of the robot is being worked on by the build team. After you have coded your drive controls, you’ll want to begin working on autonomous programs immediately. The process is simple: write out your functions, then run the autonomous functions, and make small changes until the autonomous function works consistently. Finally, once you are done with your autonomous, or have made significant progress, let the driver test the controls and practice. While testing your driver may come up with suggestions for better controls or ways to automate something. Your job will be to make that happen as quickly as possible to make the driver’s job as simple as possible.

Driving:

Once the part is built and coded, it needs to be tested. (Jan: write something that talks about EDP in driving, end it with sending it to the builder to fix)

End of the Meeting:

Find a good spot to stop working and then pack up. Make sure your workspace is clean since other people may have to use it. If this is the last meeting before a tournament, you will pack up differently. That’ll be discussed in The Tournament. When you leave, you’ll need to have a small reflection and plan for the next meeting. Think about what goals you completed and what goals you didn’t. You might realize that something didn’t work, so you’ll need to create something else. The leader will dictate what needs to be done, but you have power over how it gets done.

Conclusion of The Season

Oddly enough, the season never really ends. But for all intensive purposes, the season takes a break when you go to tournaments. You want to remember that you’re making a robot to compete. You need to be able to make deadlines that put your work on the spot. Many times you will not complete all your goals before the deadline. You only need to complete as many as it takes to get your robot working.