2022 Season Rapid React

This will be the start of our 9th season after having a non-official season in 2021. Last season, due to the corona regulations we held our own ‘from home’ FRC season in which students worked on different tasks in preparation for this build season. After the decreasing corona infections in the Netherlands and green light from our government, we started meeting in person again around September 2021.

Due to Omicron and a big team size this year, around 70 active members, we decided to do a hybrid kick off and split the team up into two teams for week 1. After week 1 we’ll decide if it’s safe to meet as 1 team again all physically. By?splitting up the team in week 1 we’re working 9 days straight with the entire team. This hopefully means that we can make big progression in the first couple weeks in order to support other teams that might have a rough fully remote start of their build season. Our aim for week 1 is a daily post and share strategic analysis, videos, prototype geometry, and ofcourse answering your questions.

Competitive Goal for 2022

We’re not shy about it. Our goal is to be able to control our own fate at every regional we’re attending. This would mean being an alliance captain/end up in the top 4. We’ll be playing at the South Florida regional in week 1 and in the Orlando Regional for week 2.

To see if we can reach our goal for this season, we had to change our design process. Previously we let emotions and prototypes cloud our judgement. This usually resulted in bad, unsubstantiated and delayed decisions. For the future we decided that robot decisions should be made based on what the game asks for. Where we try to take opinion and emotions out of the design equation.

We’ve been working hard on a new department since last season, called “Data Driven Decision Making”. We call it 3DM nowadays since it’s such a mouthful… And we thought “Strategy Department” wouldn’t cover the right emphasis in the FRC world.

This department looked into historical OPR, tasks, skills requirements lists, MCC robots and resources developed by other teams. We’ve bundled these insights, learned from them and created an approach that helps us analyze a new game. The goal of this approach for us is to determine what robot is needed to win a week 1 and 2 event. From there determine what the robot performance will be on Einstein and decided where we want to end up performance wise with our robot. Then upgrade, redesign and improve our own week 1 robot accordingly.

Design Approach 2022

?After 2019 we noticed our robot was not designed to be upgraded or even do maintenance on in between matches. In 2020 we started with design more modular and swap-able. This year we’re taking it a step further: We will not be shipping our robot this year in a flightcase.

Why is that a big decision? It means it needs to be able to taken apart and fitted into multiple smaller crates that can be checked in as luggage on a regular plane. Other seasons we’ve shipped a complete robot in week 5 or week 6. This means a huge loss of valuable time.

How will this modular design approach help us? We want to be able to iterate fast on multiple ideas/concepts and upgrade the robot throughout a competition season.

• We want to make as effective use of our ‘‘robot-play/test-time’’
• We want to be able to iterate our robot without being hindered by international travel and logistics
• Units/subsystems will be “plug & play style” which means they're testable without robot environment, enable parallel integration and thus shorter system integration time.

We’ve done our research and feel well prepared to build a successful robot according to our new design philosophy. Throughout the next couple weeks we hope to show you how we’ll be doing it all.

Goals for 2022

• Implement our strategic data insights and analysis.
• Design a modular robot that is assembled and disassembled easily and quickly.
• Being able to upgrade our robot in between our week 1/2 events and perhaps the World Championship.
• Share all our efforts with the entire community!

We’re excited for 2022 and love to share it with you all!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.

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