Week 1 in Review: Scoring Points is HARD
January 14, 2013 • ∞

If there is a universally “good” weekend in the FIRST Robotics Competition it is the first weekend. You’ve come in hot off your brainstorming and strategy sessions, you might have a kit-bot up and running, and you’ve probably got a few mock ups in the shop that look REALLY promising. That’s awesome!
Lets say you read our Rebound Fumble: Aim Low post and decided to build a simple robot. You might have decided in your strategy selection that you were only going to be a 2 pt goal robot this year, or maybe decided you were only going to hang from the first level of the pyramid. But now you’ve built these plywood and polycord drill driven prototypes, and they look really promising. So you ask yourself, “Is the 30 point hang really that much harder? This looks so easy, if we don’t do it we’re probably toast…”
If history is any indication, YES! It is that much harder!
Ultimate Ascent and Rebound Rumble are not the same game. But they do have plenty of similarities that lets us compare them. Both games involve throwing something into a 1, 2, or 3 point goal that is worth more points in autonomous. There are safe zones if you want to shoot from further away, defense is allowed up close. Teams are limited to a relatively small number of game pieces that you must retrieve from a human or pick up from the floor. The similarities break down in the end game, but for our sake lets say they aren’t that different for the median robot. There are lots of differences we aren’t discussing, but we don’t think these change how many scoring actions teams will be able to accomplish in a typical match.
- In Hybrid in 2012 the median alliance scored 6 points. That’s one score in the high goal per alliance.
- In Teleop in 2012 the median alliance scored scored 4 points. That’s two scores in the middle goal, or 1 high/1 low per alliance.
- On the Bridge in 2012, the median alliance scored 0 points. The mean scored about 5. In the last hanging game (2010) where a hang was worth 2/3 of the median match score, only 30% of qualifying matches ended with one or more robots hanging! And we feel hanging in 2010 was easier than climbing will be this year.
We don’t mean to be Debbie Downer, but we feel it’s important to frame your outlook on the competition in realistic terms. If you think you have to be able to average 30 points a match to be a 2nd round pick, then maybe that 30 point climber is the minimum competitive concept. But if that turns out to be the case, we will eat our power cord.
“How will we know it’s us without our past?” – John Steinbeck
And if you think we are pessimistic, you might be right. We think we’re being realistic, but we would love nothing more than for scores to blow our estimates out of the water. And if most of us built a simple effective robot, they probably would. :)