The Tournament
So even though tournaments are the best part of robotics, they can be very stressful. First, let me reiterate why you are building and coding your robot: to go to the tournaments. While the builders and coders work for most of the regular season, the driver works the most during the tournament. Now hopefully, you have a robot that does what you want it to do. But many times, especially early on, things break and don’t work. Oddly enough, things break more often later on because they’ve seen more action. You’ll always need to fix your robot at competitions.
Pre-Tournament
This will be an entire meeting in itself. It should be a driving-centered meeting, but depending on the state of your robot, other things may be more important than the ones listed below. Don’t break your robot, or drastically change it.
Driving Practice
Set the field up, or don’t, put a new battery in, and drive. For this, your driver should get ample time to get a feel for the robot. I recommend starting the practice how you would start a match after auton or how you would if your auton fails. Also get ready to fix any minor bugs in the robot or in the code. Don’t let your motors overheat as you’ll ruin your robot.
Scrimmages
You can also do driving practice against sister teams to give practice a more realistic sense. 1v1 or 2v2 work here, depending on how many teams are actually available. See if there are things your driver can improve on or if there are minor fixes to your robot. Suggest them after the match.
Skills Practice
1 minute on the clock, set up the entire field, and prepare your robot. Skills runs are harder to do at meetings since other teams likely need to use the field at the exact moment you do. I recommend having multiple paths planned out, so that your driver can test out different paths and score higher.
Auton Practice
When your driver needs a break, run the auton. You can do this before the driving practice so that the robot is already set up. Have one person reset the field, one person reset the robot and one person change the code. Do a few tests each time you change the code, to see if your robot is consistent.
Ending the Meeting
Once your robot is finished, your code is debugged, and your driver has enough practice, pack up your robot. Also pack up spare parts that you’ll need and some that you won’t. Don’t forget tools like dremels or metal cutters. Extra batteries and maybe an extra cable are useful. Bring rubber bands and zipties too. Try to get a good sleep or follow the tradition of all-nighters. Make sure you and everyone else has a ride to the tournament.
Pre-Matches
Once you arrive at the tournament, you’ll need to prepare your robot, do some testing, and mentally prepare yourself. First of all, make sure your robot and team (especially your driver) is there. People may come in late, so be prepared to work with less teammates or to be thrown into the mix if you’re late.
Inspection and Check-In
Once your robot is there, bring it to the inspection table. Finish up your notebook and bring it to the check-in table, the judges will take it and return it at the end of the tournament.
Practice
Next, you’ll need to warm your driver up. Practice your auton, practice general driving. Whatever you practice, you’ll never have enough space on the practice field. Make sure to run your auton a few times so that you know it works. Here is also where you should make minor changes to your robot. The most important thing is that you don’t break your robot during practice.
Scheduling
Once the schedule is released, you’ll know when your matches are and who they’re against. From this you can deduce such things as: probability of winning, when you should do skills, and when you should try to get judged. Knowing how good your team is and how good other teams are will let you know if you have an easy schedule or a hard one. You should also plan when you can do skills, a large stretch between matches is ideal. VEX also offers two apps: VEX via and VRC Hub.
Other Tips
You’ve practiced and you know your schedule, what’s next? Keep your pockets full: Keep screws, nuts, a screwdriver and a wrench, and small pieces of metal in your pockets. Don’t forget rubber bands (I keep a bag on my belt), zip ties (in the bag), and a spare battery (back pocket). I would also suggest goggles for the drive team. Eat: Make sure you eat something every once in a while and drink some water.
Qualification Matches
Please take everything said as guidelines, and that you should cater to your driver.
Drive Team
Your driver will select up to 2 other members to be the drive team. Their job is to give useful information to the driver such as time remaining, where game objects are, and strategies. Depending on what your driver wants to hear some people may be better drive team members than others. Wear your goggles!
Preparing the Robot
Get to the prep table 1-2 matches before your own. Talk to your teammate about auton and which one to use. You may also want to talk about strategies. Make sure that your robot is actually ready. Replace old rubber bands, swap for fresh batteries, anything that can tire will need to be replaced at some point. When you get on the field, set up your robot and ensure that the field is set up correctly. The drive team should be with the driver, and everyone else should be in the stands. The match will start, 2 minutes will pass, and it’ll be done.
Mid-Matches
You should welcome match breaks as your only downtime during the stressful day. But, this is not the case as most times you will have to do robotics related work. Your breaks will range from 5 minutes to 30. On every break you’ll need to fix minor changes on your robot or in the code and on every long break you should try to do judging or skills.
Scouting
Scouting occurs throughout the entire tournament. Even at the beginning of the tournament, someone should be scouting. Many times sister teams compile 2-3 people to scout together. They should switch with others as scouting can become tiresome, especially since there can be many qualification matches. Scouts watch as many matches as they can to see which robots are good and which aren’t. You will need the information your scouts found during the elimination matches. Scouts should look for auton accuracy, offense, defense, and general driving. Since each game is different, you may want to add different categories in your notes.
Skills
Keep an eye on the skills line as it can build up very quickly in large tournaments. When you have a large break between matches, about 10 minutes if the line is short 20 minutes if it isn’t, you should do skills. Your driver will have 1 minute to score as many points as they can.
Judging
When the judges come to your table, you should try to have your interview unless you have a match immediately. If you have to delay it, try to give them a time when they can return. Make sure everyone is there, introduce yourselves and mention if people didn’t make the tournament. Use this accompanying slideshow: Teresa’s Judging Guide
About the Robot (Slides 3-5)
First talk about your current design. We have the lead builder mostly talk about it, with people chiming in when necessary. Make sure to discuss defining parts of your robot and how those parts help you play the game. You may want to include relevant game stats that you can complete during a match. Also describe how your robot is different from other robots to give the judges’ a perspective. You’ll also want to talk about pros and cons of your robot. Mention as much as you need to but don’t put your robot down too much. Have a secondary builder talk about your previous designs, mentioning the previously said things.
More on the Design (Slides 6-9)
If things haven’t been mentioned about the build, mention them here. If people haven’t talked a lot, let them talk. If the entire team understands the design, the judges will notice. Talk about general things like why the design is effective, what it lets you do, why it isn’t the best, and any trade-offs you made. Try to wrap up what you have to say about the robot now, as you don’t want to sidetrack when you’re talking about coding.
About the Code (Slides 11-13)
Have the coder talk through this section, but have the driver on standby incase code needs to be demonstrated. Start with explaining auton and all the situations of each. It may be a good idea to mention future auton ideas to show that you’re thinking ahead. Next talk about the controller functions with the driver adding notes. You can do some actual examples here to help explain. Make sure to talk about macros and unique code and how they help the driver. The largest part to mention for all of this is advantages and disadvantages with the code and the drive. You can spend as much time talking about code as you do talking about the design.
Other Pointers (Slides 14-19)
Mention driving strategies as a lot of people don’t. Mention any small things about the robot, the code, the drive, or any behind-the-scenes strategies. Once you learn physics, you can talk about basic relations or even use actual measurements. Anything Teresa has mentioned that was the reason she won, you should include. Judges look for very specific things and those comments are coming directly from judges. This is the guide that judges use: Judge Guide This is rubric for the interviews: Interview Rubric This is rubric for the design award, which is based on your judging and notebook: Design Rubric Other Things To Do Sometimes you just need to take a break between matches. Other times you need to rebuild half your robot. First, make sure you eat and drink some water. Staying somewhat healthy is necessary. Next, refrain from too much practice as you don’t want to wear out your driver or your robot. But if something needs to be tested or a bug needs to be fixed, test it. Third, you’ll want to do some auton practicing and correction. If you think you’re alright, take a break.
Elimination Matches
After your qualification matches, each team will be ranked by win points. Assuming you’ve done well enough in the tournament you’ll get to pick your partner. If you haven’t, hope to get picked.
Alliance Selection
Once each team is ranked, they’ll repeat this process for determining the alliances: The highest ranking team announces their partner team The team can either accept or decline If they accept, the 2 teams become an alliance and it repeats for the next team If they decline, the selected team can’t be selected by anyone else, but can still choose a partner if they have the chance. The first team returns to step 1.
Before alliance selection, you and your team should sit down and come up with a list of the teams that you want to pick and what happens if someone picks you. Trying to figure everything out can be hard, but if you think through methodically, you’ll do fine.
So, the highest teams basically get any team they choose and lower teams have to go with whoever picks them. If you are a lower team and get picked, you say yes. Higher teams have more strategy. You’ll want to consider the following: Scouting notes - you didn’t take these for nothing, good notes will result in good picks Auton scoring - the more consistent auton is always a good indicator of a good team Previous partners - playing with someone previously can determine if they’re good or not If worse comes to worst, either pick the highest ranking team you can (they’re there for a reason) or pick a sister team (you can at least have fun with friends).
What happens if you’re highly ranked and get picked? Again, you’ll want to have decided beforehand whether to accept or decline. Consider: If you decline, will they take your pick? Can you still do well without that pick? If you accept, are they the best match for you? This is a hard situation to be in and discussing it with your team is the only correct answer.
You should also talk to other teams about alliancing or not alliancing. Remember, if a team you don’t want to partner with picks you, you can’t get picked again. So, you can either risk it, or ask them not to pick you. Both are entirely fine. If you want to pick a team, you should approach them and ask them if they want to alliance. If they say no, you should respect that. If they say yes, you should try to pick them. When talking to another high ranking team, you’ll want to talk through the possibility that either of you can get picked by another high-ranking team. Since each team has their own right at the win, each team has to respect another’s right. This comes up when each team wants to get picked by the highest team, but can’t and therefore has to create contingency plans that benefit themselves the most.
As a wrap-up, because alliance selection is confusion:
- If you’re high on the scoreboard:
- Pick a team who is good and wants to be picked by you
- If you’re picked, ask yourself if you want to play with that team or take a chance on another
- If you’re middle on the scoreboard:
- Pick a team you can have fun with
- If you’re picked, make sure it’s a team you have a decent chance with
- If you’re low on the scoreboard:
- If you’re picked, say yes because you might not be able to pick
Elimination Matches (Elims)
Your matches here will be just like your qualification matches, except now you have a set partner. Just make sure that you get to your match on time and do your best.
Time-Out
For all of the Elims, your alliance gets 1 time-out. Generally you save your time out to finish a repair or an auton before the semi-finals or finals. Each time-out is 3 minutes long. Use it properly.