Team Captain: Logan Holtje, Shreeya T_______
Develop/enhance team processes and shared vision
Establish team-wide metrics and address weak points
Inter/Intra team building to maximize effectiveness
Organize season schedules and team-wide events
Drives the team's schedules
Main communicator from students to mentors and boosters
Maximize the value of fall and post-season training
Use team input to make major decisions
Hold leads accountable for their responsibilities and help those struggling
Backstop all sub-team leads
Help establish the project’s success criteria
Identify requirements and constraints
Set a detailed timeline and monitor the progress of a project
Identify and mitigate risks as early as possible
Help the team adjust to project changes and reach checkpoints within a reasonable time frame
Final say on project decisions
The final call on buying new parts
Establishes deadlines for the proposal phase, prototype and test phase, main prototype phase, final construction of mechanisms, electrical board construction, autonomous programming, teleoperated programming, etc.
Ensures operations are making progress on arranging outreach events, reaching sponsors, creating FIRST presentations, and sponsors are appropriately represented on the final robot, on team shirts, and team banner
Directs the agenda and the team
Main Sub-teams
Mechanical:
Leads: Gabe Kim, Abhay Nagaraj
If needed, prepare training plans
Teach the training materials (w/ mentors)
Keep track of the progress of the tasks their subteam needs to do (through any form of task management. Ex. Kanban, Clickup, spreadsheet, etc).
Figure out what parts to order for the robot (w/ captain and mentors)
CADmiral - CAD lead (Abhay )
Ensure CAD is properly integrated with the Robot
Responsible for creating a system to organize CAD files and ensuring that the CAD files on Onshape or elsewhere are organized
make sure that the "ideas" are in their own category. Then when they become a part of the robot, transfer their files to one titled "robot"(or something).
During build season ensures all members who aren’t in the workshop have a CAD project to work on.
Trains rookies during pre-season on CADing
Manufacturing - Workshop lead (Gabe )
Must ensure the workshop is getting cleaned at the end of meetings
Ensures every member has a manufacturing job into the build season if they are not doing CAD
Does their best to maintain an inventory list
Trains rookies during pre-season on using the workshop, closet, shed, etc.
Responsible for "quick and dirty" prototypes and fixes and modifications that do not require precise and accurate machine tools
Fabrication (Logan Holtje)
Head of precision and accurate manufacturing: train new members on precision equipment and machines
Identifies parts that need to be made accurately and precisely and after ensuring an appropriate design is complete (and possible to be manufactured) fabricates the necessary parts
Responsible for manufacturing precise and accurate parts for final robot
Hardware & Development - (Shreeya Thakre)
During pre-season, manages the returning members so that they either continue their training by working on projects (see team Captain for project ideas or come up with more) or assist in training rookies.
This lead can switch roles (and switch back) with one of the other Mech leads at any time if both agree.
Ensures throughout the pre-season and build season that every member has a task/project to work on.
Ensures that CAD is updated and completed before any finalized manufacturing is done
General
Designing the robot.
Make sure the robot is within regulations. (Mechanical checklist from FRC)
Creating a bill of materials.
Fabricating the robot.
Testing different mechanisms of the robot.
Electrical
Leads:
If needed, prepare training plans
Teach Training materials (w/ mentors)
Order parts for the robot (w/ mentors)
Keep track of progress of the tasks their subteam needs to do (on Clickup).
General:
Make sure the electrical aspects of the robot are in the regulations (electrical checklist from FRC).
Gather information about what mechanisms need in terms of electrical components.
Plan the electrical board based on what the mechanisms need.
If needed, plan the pneumatics board based on what the mechanisms need.
Have a bill of materials for the parts that need to be bought.
Fabricate the electrical board, and if needed the pneumatics board.
Software
Leads:
Prepare training plans as needed
Check-in, Work, + Finalize Pre-training with Pre-training Leads
Ensure software section of wiki is organized + up-to-date
Ensure software is documented for debugging and testing and maintained on GitHub
Keep track of programming progress
Help members develop programming skills
Conduct code reviews with all software members + mentors
Pre-training Leads:
Prepare + Teach Pre-training material
Grade Quizzes
Help + Answer Questions for Rookies
General
Program subsystems
Communicate with Mechanical + Electrical sub-teams to understand robot design
Operations
Lead: Catherine Steinberg
Help members develop skills for business operations and outreach
Create weekly to-do lists to keep up with the season schedule
General
Find and organize outreach events
Support stem events,
Organize events aimed to help STEM minorities
Manage the budget
Maintain and recruit sponsors
Write the bi-monthly newsletter
Apply for grants
Use subteam input to make major operations decisions
Other Sub-teams/Roles (during Entire Year)
Safety: tbd
Ensure there is PPE being worn (in the shop or at competitions).
Safety members need to be aware of safety procedures for each subteam.
Make sure those safety procedures are followed.
Make sure all members have passed the safety quiz (school made).
Make sure all members have filled out the safety forms.
Communications
Makes sure that every member is on:
Slack
Teamsnap
Team's Google Drive
Clickup
Handles the announcements that are sent out to each member.
Handles calendar dates (put on Clickup) for events. Make sure to let members know of these things:
Location
Time
Integrations
Assists the team Captain in communicating between the technical sub-teams together to transfer project steps and ideas appropriately
The team Captain can delegate responsibilities to the integration lead for assistance
Integrated Project Teams (IPT)
New structure used for build season that sectioned mechanism development for the robot into separate teams
Each team consisted of Mechanical, Electrical, and Software members that were responsible to work together during the entire design process to ensure mechanisms were realistic to program and had essential sensors and wiring allocation.
Consists of the team leads and unique 'IPT leads' which were essentially leads in training
Team Captain supervised and managed
Reflections:
This system has the potential to be really effective at turning the large problem of the robot into smaller problems of each mechanism while maintaining sub team specific tasks of electrical taking care of the electrical board, software programming the robot, and mechanical designing and building the robot.
Issues:
Requires substantial and constant communication among the teams every meeting.
Extremely difficult for Team Captain to maintain project management without sacrificing working on the design and build of the robot (hard for someone in a role whose responsibility is the final say on all robot design decisions).
In order to maintain team synergy and integration, again communication is required, scoring and intake this year designed their mechanisms in a vacuum not much thought was put into integrating the two was made until it was too late.
Pros:
Good for getting more people involved in the robot due to the groups being smaller than an entire sub team (particularly for mechanical) so using task management strategies is easier on a smaller scale. (Requires the IPT groups to use said task management strategies however, Kanban would be helpful)
Great for electrical and software to feel heard and get a say on robot design decisions
Other Sub-teams (during Comp Season and off-season competitions only)
Strategy
Be very familiar with the game's objectives and rules.
List and organize the robot's "skills", actions that the robot could partake in, from moving on the carpet to shooting a gamepiece.
Develop an optimal game strategy during Kickoff that takes into account current team capabilities and points vs. robot development effort.
Finding the optimal strategy could include numerical simulations (with google spreadsheets to keep track of points & timings).
Develop a Robot Design Strategy that defines the robot's criteria and specifications.
Prioritize the criteria and specifications of the robot for an optimal build season (more important criteria and specifications completed first).
Unify the team's vision on the game strategy and robot design strategy via a team review for a cohesive build season.
Scouting
Determine metrics to scout and develop/improve upon a scouting system
Ensure Drive Coach receives a pre-match breakdown before every match
Arrive at competitions with data on every team that has already competed (and are attending that competition)
Develop a scouting schedule and ensure scouts arrive and provide accurate data
Prep team members on expectations during competition and the importance of scouting
Learning and being proficient in all forms of scouting
Work with the software team on creating a scouting app
Lead prepares training materials and prepares a training lesson on scouting for those attending a competition
Ensure all scouting materials are up to date with the game being played and works with the team's current strategy
Work with the strategy team on prioritizing the most important scouting data according to the team's strategy