Do Teams Get Better At Events?

The simple answer is yes.  The more complicated more useful follow-on question is “Which teams get better and how?”  

If you take a moving average across all qualifying matches at qualifying events (we ignore MAR, MSC, & CMP), you find that during the first qualifying match teams average about 15 points.  By the time alliance selection rolls around they are averaging around 22.  That’s a nearly 50% increase over the course of the average event!

You can see this in the linear regression above.  Plotted in black is a 30 match moving average.  Plotted in red on top of that is a linear regression through the moving average points.  Since different events are different lengths we normalized each event by number of matches and plotted them all from zero (first qualifying match) to 1 (last qualifying match before alliance selection).

Now that we know that the average team improves, there are a couple of follow on questions that we think are important.  Thanks to the @FRCFMS twitter feed, the relatively easy one to answer is in which areas teams improve.  Relative to the first match, teams improved roughly 50% in autonomous mode, 40% in teleop, 100% at balancing (for regular points), 80% (for coop points), and yet are only 10% better at avoiding penalties.

The harder question that we are not yet ready to answer is which teams improved.  Robot goodness is not a normal distribution.  By OPR in Logomotion, about 50% of robots were worth <5 points.  Meanwhile there were a small handful of robots that would regularly post 40+ points.  For the most entertaining matches, we would hope that the middle to lower end of the field is driving most of the improvement. However, if it happens that most of that improvement is being driven by teams that are already very good getting even better then blow-out qualifying matches will become even more lopsided.  We’re not ready to issue a final verdict on that topic – we’ve got some more math to do.