The Workflow Approaches of CAOS Robotics (2022-2023)

Lucy C.

“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”

-Scott Belsky

As a part of the FIRST Robotics community, CAOS Robotics has come to conclude that Belsky’s testimony is more important than ever. No matter how attentive a person can be while completing tricky calculations or how methodical a person is when conceiving ideas, one cannot be a successful individual in the STEM community without having the dedication, discipline, and workflow necessary to facilitate progress and productivity. Problem-solving and scientific expertise was not what helped us get this far in FIRST Robotics—it was the critical workflow and soft skills critical that helped further our progress. We did not just develop ideas. We made them happen. We were able to assimilate skills crucial to thriving in the workforce. Essential skills like clever prioritization, selective attention, and project management were what made us the robotics team we are today.

To strengthen our prioritization and time management skills as a robotics team and as high school students, we had been able to strategically plan our tasks based on the urgency and importance. We, in fact, unconsciously but noticeably internalized the methodical Eisenhower principle.

To elaborate, below is a matrix representing the tasks we prioritized with the principle during our meeting on March 2nd.

The tasks we had to prioritize first were the activities that are important and urgent. This task, for our March 2nd meeting, was fixing our odometry; we needed to fix our odometry, because in past competitions, our robot had been dormant during its autonomous period. Hence, we knew in our minds this was important. Additionally, competitions were nearing, so this was also urgent. This was how we were able to make the logical decision of prioritizing and dedicating most of the day to odometry.

Then, there was our urgent yet unimportant task: helping our high school prepare for the Spring Dance; our high school’s Spring Dance was supposed to occur on the next day, thereby making the task urgent. However, we also knew that it was not necessarily important to us as a Robotics team nor a FIRST competitor—having a Spring Dance would not necessarily impact our ranks in FIRST Robotics, and we knew we needed to focus on other crucial tasks like odometry. Hence, we decided to delegate these tasks to new and willing members of CAOS Robotics so that we could support our high school while still prioritizing what was necessary. Next on the matrix was an important but unurgent task: one of our freshmen, Mischa, was trying to learn FTC programming; she knew it would be important in the long-term, since two of our senior programmers in our team would end up graduating from our school and hence would not be able to participate on our team as coders. It was not urgent, though, since she pretty much had until next year to attain a foundational understanding of FTC programming. Hence, although it was not a top priority like fixing the odometry was, it was embedded into our plans as a secondary goal for that day’s meeting.

With our detailed plans, we had been able to lessen our distractions and become undistracted by any tasks that could have ended up in the final quadrant: the quadrant for non urgent and unimportant tasks.

In addition to using key prioritization skills to weed out unnecessary tasks, each student was also able to utilize sharp attention skills to ensure each of our designated tasks were being completed amid the commotion of the CAOS Robotics workflow. More specifically, we applied selective attention, a cognitive skill representing one’s ability to select and focus on a relevant task while remaining undistracted by commotion or other external factors. Our busy, chaotic meeting on November 10th, 2022 naturally demanded that selective attention. Several things were occurring on that day: James, at the time, was just joining our team, a reeling mechanism for the Picky Eater was being constructed, code for both our primary and secondary controllers needed to be typed, engineering notebooks needed to be written, team jackets had to be sewn, and we were preparing to mount our team number. Anyone could have been distracted by the heterogeneity of activity.

However, each member was able to apply selective attention and avoid becoming overwhelmed and flurried by all this abundant activity. For instance, James, while he was still new to CAOS Robotics, was able to simultaneously assimilate our team’s dynamics and provide input about the building of the robot as an aspiring mechanical engineer of CAOS Robotics. He, in other words, was able to quickly and conveniently switch his attention from absorbing information to relaying information, showing how he was able to flexibly and fluidly apply selective attention. Mr. Brown, as our supervisor, had to further expand the bounds of his attention: he had to be able to greet and communicate with James, support our mechanical engineers in designing the reeling mechanism and mounting the team number, and lend me assistance when it came to writing information for my Engineering Notebook—all during a single two-hour meeting! He had to pay attention to all of these responsibilities, applying fluid but selective attention for each one. Our mechanical engineers also had to apply selective attention; they had to be able to attend to the robot as well as answer questions about what was happening.

Finally, there was our ability to manage our projects and workflow. We implemented a variety of different skills and strategies to enhance our management. One of these skills was project scoping. Project scoping is the ability to analyze the size, goals, and limitations of a project to facilitate plans. During our meeting on February 23, we were able to understand the goal of creating a more compact design for the odometry wheels, but we knew that Samson, the captain of our team, was sick, so we could not yet do much work on the odometry wheels at the present. By analyzing this goal and this limitation, we decided to plan for Sullivan and Samson to collaborate on the design of the odometry on Saturday of that week. Additionally, we knew that since several of our team members were absent on that day, we would have to work around that limitation in order to gain driving practice and help one another assimilate the controls: new members of CAOS Robotics, myself included, were given the opportunity to practice driving so that we could immerse ourselves in the driving as well as help potential drivers who were available during that meeting assimilate the controls. We were able to make wise decisions based on the goals we wanted to accomplish and the limitations placed on the accomplishment of these goals.

Another way we demonstrated excellent project management was by using the agile methodology. This is a methodology particularly used in software development that can help break down steps in the workflow process and allow users to better evaluate progress; it is a cyclical process that consists of five steps:

1. Definition and requirements

2. Planning of sprints and tasks

3. Collaborative design development

4. Creation and implementation of tech

5. Reviewing and assessment

CAOS Robotics applied this methodology for the code, specifically the autonomous code for our odometry. We originally used a time-based system to help facilitate autonomous movements with our odometry wheels, but after designing and implementing this system using the agile methodology, we decided to refine our autonomous program and instead use FTC’s Road Runner motion planning library. We then followed each of the five steps of the agile methodology: first, understood that we needed to take advantage of our odometry to enhance our autonomous period (definition/analysis of concepts), decided to update our odometry code with Road Runner on Saturday (planning of sprints), collaborated amongst each other on that day to discuss and complete the code (collaborative design development), updated and tested our code during driving practice with RoboGenesis (create/implement), and evaluated our progress (review/monitor). With this methodology, we were able to hasten the design process as well as take note of our limitations in our autonomous code.

Last but not least, we utilized coopetition to generate more progress. In business, coopetition is the act of cooperating with a competing business in hopes of getting mutually beneficial results. Although CAOS Robotics is not necessarily a business, our team did apply the mindsets and goals similar to and characteristic of business coopetition. During our meeting on January 19th, we cooperated with a fellow competitor in FIRST Robotics—RoboGenesis. We knew we would technically still be competing with this team in this year’s FIRST competition, but nonetheless, we decided to spend that meeting to swap coding advice and practice driving alongside one another, as that is representative of FIRST’s core philosophy: gracious professionalism.

In conclusion, CAOS Robotics has been able to employ a variety of clever strategies in order to enhance our workflow and generate abundant progress as a part of the FIRST community. We were able to utilize core workflow techniques and cognitive skills relating to time management, selective attention, and project management.

We are honored to model these indispensable skills as a FIRST Robotics team and members of our community.

Further Reading:

Eisenhower Matrix

The Agile Process 101