Semi Regionals SWOT Analysis

By Fernando, Nalin, Pavit, Anda, Elm, and David

At Semi Regionals, we earned the 2nd place Inspire Award and were the 6th and final team from the tournament to advance to regionals. Soon after the tournament, the team conducted an in-depth analysis of every match we played in as well as judging and overall observations. All of the key points we discussed are boiled down in the SWOT analysis below.

Strengths

The tank-drive chassis proved its structural resilience throughout the competition, surviving aggressive defensive encounters without mechanical failure. The launcher was also accurate from the audience launch zone during teleop, when the limelight was able to successfully sense the April tags on the goals. However, there was often a lot of backspin on the artifacts which caused them to bounce out. Another strength was that our morning presentation went relatively well, and the judges were very intrigued by the unique design of our robot. Shortening our presentation definitely made a huge impact as the judges were able to follow the robot’s story arch better and were able to get a deeper understanding of the subsystems. During the pit interviews, we were better able to convey our outreach journey than we were in the formal presentation.

For most matches, our timing in the endgame was better, since we were mainly parking with 7 seconds left. We were also strategic with where we picked up artifacts, making sure both us and our alliance partner could cycle as quickly as possible. Between matches, we were efficient at getting a fresh battery on the robot for each match, and we made sure to queue on time. We were better able to coordinate with our alliance partners to discuss strategy before game play, but we can do a better job on overall scouting during the morning.

Weaknesses:

One major weakness was the limelight's position on our robot. It could easily get blocked by other robots, so the flywheel velocity was very inaccurate several times. When the artifact leaves the Rimfire, it has a lot of backspin. So while the shots are accurate, they bounce out of the goals. While some parts of our driving are strategic, we definitely need more driver practice. We would open the gate, but then leave all the artifacts for the opposing alliance instead of immediately intaking them. Our drive team and human players need to communicate better with each other, so that we get a smoother intake process and less fouls. We need quicker cycle times to score more points. Our cycle times are slow right now primarily due to the amount of time it takes for the Rimfire to speed up. Some of the rounds were also taking around 15 seconds to get to the base. The side-belt on the robot is also continuing to harm our robot’s performance. Also, during one autonomous period, we received two major fouls for touching the opposing robot, and shots overall were consistently inaccurate during the auton period.

Judging wise, we did not convey our outreach material as well as we did our technical parts during the formal presentation. We also went over time on our presentation. During our pit interviews, some of our answers were too long, which would just end up diluting the information we were presenting to the judges. We also need to work on our speaking tempo and make sure we are more clear while presenting our thoughts.

Opportunities:

Since we advanced to Regionals, we need a serious Pit Revamp from last season. We want to design banners as well as get a more professional pit setup than last year. There is a lot more presentation practice we can do with our mentors and coach to help us improve even more by the time regionals come around. Also, major editing needs to be done on the portfolio to create space for new subsystems and newer iterations for existing ones.

Speaking about new subsystems, we have an ambitious goal set in place to try and build a new robot in time for regionals. We need the intake area to be wider, and there to be a turret to allow for super quick cycle times and reduce driver precision as much as possible. We are also going to update our flywheel to make it a much simpler and more effective design than it currently is.

However, we still need to be doing consistent driver practice on the old robot. One of the biggest limiting factors we had in both the league tournament and at the semis was a lack of driver practice. Especially in the season, there are so many small strategic moves that the driver has to come very naturally to the driver to score as many points as possible. Driver practice would also help continue to reduce our cycle times.

Code-wise, it would be beneficial to start developing code for the new turret system as well as trying to get more artifacts into the classifier during auton. Also, to help the driver, it would be beneficial to introduce the virtual field map into teleop as well as auton.

Threats:

One of our biggest threats is that there are already high-performing teams with effective turrets on their robots. Trying to match that in a very limited amount of time certainly carries its risks, but through our discussion, we decided that it was necessary and that the pros did in fact, outweigh the cons.

Another major threat is big box-like robots that can easily disrupt our shooting sequence and push us around on the field. Developing a new robot would help combat some of these problems, as the limelight would be pushed back further into the robot.