CPR ISS Division - Strategy

An excellent robot is not the sole ingredient needed to form an excellent team. With this understanding, we maximize our alliance members’ strengths by using an elaborate data systems to formulate smart strategies. 

Pre-competition Preparation - Driven by Strategy

CPR Informatics & Scouting/Strategy Division works hand-in-hand with our drive and build teams – it requires frequent communication in the design, build, drive practice, and competition phases of the season. This is more likely to what students will find in the workplace – program management, strategy, and teamwork.

Kick-off 

We emphasizes that our goal each season is to get to Houston Championship and to compete well there. To do that, we need to get District Points. We look at what elements give us the RP needed to get the highest seeding and therefore the highest district points.

2020 Season

From day one we quickly established that climbing was our first priority. Of course our team members wanted a perfect shooter, but scouting reiterated multiple times that the climber had to be ready and tested for our first competition in order to increase our chances of earning an extra ranking point. Beyond climbing, our second priority was auto. This meant finishing the robot in a timely manner so that our software division had the time they needed to program. Guiding priorities as a scouting team helped us reach these goals.

2019 Season

Climber was critically important. It needed to be incorporated in the build from the beginning – not tacked on at the end – to get the ranking point..

Cargo was the next tiebreaker for ranking at competitions. We emphasized this in all of our match strategies at competition. There were often several teams that had the same RP. In our 4 competitions, there were always teams tied with us for RP in the ranking. We were at the top of that group in every single ranking. This makes it more likely for us to become a captain and also makes us more likely to get picked.

Build Season & Drive Practice

The list of scouting features on the wish list typically exceeds the build team’s ability to create them. This requires frequent communication between us and Build to clarify the priorities list.

Focus on our RP priorities – We find we need to remind the engineering teams frequently about what is important in matches.

Lobbying - Networking to Promote Fruitful Alliance

To place ourselves on the radars of top teams, our team’s lobbyist advocates for why we would be excellent alliance partners in the playoffs. Our lobbyist first writes a report on each team she plans to lobby, reporting their strengths and weaknesses. When talking with other teams, respectful language is our favorite business technique. We always begin the conversation by stating what we admire about their team. Then, we advocate for how our robot’s strengths would pair excellently with their strengths. To make sure our conversation is convincing and memorable, we leave them with a lobbying sheet that includes an explanation of our robot’s capabilities and a couple Tableau graphs so they can see how we compare to other teams.

Match Strategy - Making a Wiser Decision

Success isn’t always spontaneous; therefore, our team’s strategist will create well-informed plans to ensure we achieve the most successful match possible. I say well-informed because we use both quantitative (via Tableau match rubrics & data visualizations) and qualitative data. Looking at Tableau, a strategist can determine what each alliance partner excels in, which helps the alliance appropriately distribute roles; using qualitative data, a strategist learns about more subtle robot qualities, giving him the ability to create a more refined strategy. Being well prepared, a strategist uses our specially designed Match Strategy sheets to write a synopsis on our alliance partners and opponents that will be given to our drive coach. This sheet includes a picture of the game field so that our strategist can map out pathways for robots, especially during autonomous, to prevent “traffic jams.”

Alliance Selection - Creating a Strong Alliance

No team can deny the importance of forming a strong alliance. Therefore, we often have a six hour long scouting meeting the night before alliance selections to ensure our pick list is refined to near perfection. To make well-informed decisions, we create a panorama of Tableau graphs and qualitative data sheets.

Mocking Alliance Selection - In addition to meticulously creating a pick-list, we also perform mock alliance selections. In other words, we anticipate the second and third picks of the top eight teams to see where we would fall and who we might compete against during the playoffs. This helps us better prepare not only for alliance selections but also for the playoff matches.