Interview with highschool robotics team: Titanium Knights B
Team G (us): What do you think is the best step to take after you get your challenge for the year?
Team B: Well, this season was very different as you guys know too well. We created a document highlighting all the potential ways we can score and the point values attributed to that as soon as our competition is released. Right after that, we assigned a few people on our team to read the entire game-manual to look for important rules that the build team and programming team need to be aware of. While those people are reading the entire game-manual, we have a few people start brainstorming ideas. This year, my team and I met for hours after the release of our game in September. We CADed potential designs for out subsystems (such as intake, outtake, and pusher), and drew out potential strategies. Our cad software of choice is Autodesk Inventor.
Team G (us): How many months did you spend building, strategizing, and practicing driving?
Team B: Our competition is a bit different from VEXIQ in the sense that our competition is revealed in September, and our world competition is in April/May. So there are a few months of the year where we don’t know what the competition is. We call this time period the pre-season. We dedicate the pre-season to create a bunch of CAD designs of potential drivetrains that we can use for the season, making a lot of Util Classes for programming, and reach out to companies for sponsorships/mentorships. For clarification, Util classes are helper classes or chunks of code that we can allocate to make our actual autonomous code more readable and concise. Once the game is revealed, we break off into 3 groups, build, programming, and non-tech. We have a lot of people in our team (Around 25 total). Build works on designing/creating a robot that we call “v1” while programming works on creating a tele-op (driving) code and an autonomous code. We expect v1 to be done in around a month and a half. After this period, we look at other teams’ designs, reflect on our robot, and then create a “v2” robot. This robot serves as our final design (obviously we have to make small tweaks throughout the season but the design shouldn’t change too much). We expect v2 to be done in 2 months. We have competitions starting in November all the way to march and if we advance/do good, it goes all the way into April. This sort of planning also allows programmers to have adequate time to debug and test autonomous code. During all of this, the non-tech team works on reaching out to mentors, try and attain sponsorships, and document what build and programming are doing in our engineering notebook.
Team G (us): What is your favorite part of the whole robot design process and competition?
Team B: I love building individual subsystems and watching them come together and work with each other. For example this year our challenge is to intake a bunch of rings (made out of foam) and then shoot them or launch them into a goal. This required us to create 4 big systems- intake, indexer, shooter, and drivetrain. Watching them come together and create a functional robot is spectacular. Additionally, I love the fact that we can reproduce a physical robot based on a CAD that we make digitally. CADing your robot before actually building it ensures that our 10+ people build team are all on the same page and reduces the possibilities of errors while building.
Team G (us):What is the best piece of advice you could give to a robotics team?
Team B: Something we really worked to internalize this year was taking the initiative to do things as soon as they came up. We had a lot of extra time this year because we were able to start working during the pre-season, but we knew that we had to do things promptly in order to make the best use of that time. For a long time, it was just the 3 captains on the team, and the only reason we were able to make as much progress as we did was because we knew no one else would do things if we didn’t. Our biggest advice to you is that, if you realize there is something to be done, do it right away instead of hoping someone else will or that you will get to it later; it’ll pay off in the end.
Team G (us): Has competitive robotics taught you anything that will benefit you for the rest of your life? If so, what?
Team B: Competitive robotics is unique from other group activities in that you truly need to put in work as a team every single day. In FIRST, you cannot succeed as an individual: unless you help the team progress every single day, whether by contributing to the shared team robot or with ideas or outreach, you won’t get anywhere. In other team activities, like team sports, you do individual training to make yourself a better team member, and may even work hard to stand out as the best member of your team. Our involvement in FIRST has given us the unique opportunity, found in no other activity, to act purely in the interest of the team, rather than trying to boost ourselves; this is a lesson we will surely use for the rest of our lives, in the workforce & in life.
Team G (us): This was incredible thank you so much for your time and answers.
Team B: No problem, anytime.
Quote from Team B
If you realize there is something to be done, do it right away instead of hoping someone else will or that you will get to it later; it’ll pay off in the end.
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