FTC:Strategy

Strategy is a very big part of making a team’s season successful. There are four main types of strategy:

• Game Strategy
• Match Strategy
• Robot Strategy
• Team Strategy

Game Strategy

Every year, the FTC game changes its theme, therefore, a new strategy should be formed for the new missions. Keep in mind the difficulty of the mission and how many points it is worth. To determine the difficulty of the missions, the hardware and software difficulties of the mission should be determined. A team can determine this however they want to, an easy way to do this is by voting. Keep in mind everyone’s viewpoint on why the mission should be a specific difficulty, especially team members specializing in that field. Then, teams should first attempt missions that are the least difficult and the most amount of points. That way, teams should be able to build something faster, while still getting a lot of points. However, remember to not just go for everything that will have simple builds because a big part of judging is how unique and creative subsystems are.

Match Strategy

For robot matches, teams need to consider many different possibilities because what will happen during the run is very unpredictable. On every driveteam there is a person called a coach. This person is responsible for directing the drivers around the field and making sure they are scoring the most points possible. The drivers and coach especially should be made well aware of what to do in every situation on the field:

• What should we do if the robot starts to run out of battery?
• What should we do if important hardware breaks or falls off our robot?
• What should we do if the other team is faster at using game pieces and we can’t get to any?
• What should we do if the robot disconnects from the phone or other software malfunctions?
• What should we do if our alliance partner isn’t working with us?

All these situations and more when going into matches should be considered. That way, teams can be much more successful.

On top of in-game strategy, strategy with an alliance partner is important because every single robot is unique. Some robots might work really well together, and some may not. It’s up to the alliance to figure out how to best work together. For example, say two robots are similar in function. They both can lift and push game pieces. Having one robot push the game pieces and the other one lifting will increase alliances’ efficiency because each team only has to focus on doing one task. Using this strategic mindset will benefit everyone in an alliance and team.

Robot Strategy

Having a good strategy while building or making modifications that will affect a team's robot is another great way to become much more successful. While building a robot, it is important to build the most effective solution with the least amount of parts and time. This is because strategically having the best space usage will allow a robot to have extra space for things that could be added later on. Designing a robot in CAD is a great way to see how much space the robot takes up, and how much it has left.

Aside from building the robot, there are multiple other things it’s important to be strategic about when working with the robot. Make sure to always have the batteries and phones charged. That way, dead electronics won’t ever halt progress. Another thing to be strategic about when working with the robot is to always coordinate with other subteams. A subteam is a small group of people on a team that is focusing on working on a specific part of the robot. This could be subsystems or attachments that need to be worked on, software, or other hardware aspects of the robot. If one subteam is working on the robot it’s nearly impossible for the other team to work on the robot. That means it’s important to always be coordinating meetings around one team so all other teams will have equal opportunities to work on the robot.

Team Strategy

Team communication and organization are very important for a successful team. Tell teammates about progress and update them on new developments. Make sure that every team member knows what is going on and can answer basic questions about each topic. It is nice to have a setup for communication, either through an app or in person. This will help remind team members to communicate and keep it consistent.

A team schedule is another important tool. Having a team calendar like Google Calendar that everyone can access keeps everyone on the same page for meeting times and event dates. Make sure that each member is on the calendar and can update it.