【分享帖】Oversea Teams Q&A Collection - by Virginia Tech

Team publicity and operations

1. How to manage the whole team systematically, assign tasks and resources?

A: The task of the algorithm group is parallel to that of the mechanical group and is mainly responsible for the development of the matching symbol and the ICRA algorithm. The embedded system is responsible for debugging the related codes with algorithms and mechanical groups. The Operations Group is responsible for progress control, capital control, material purchase and publicity. The common team structure is:

When preparing for the competition, each technical group is linked by the project, which is divided into the standard group, hero group, engineering group, sentry group and aerial group. Each project has a general manager and corresponding technical leader, and the technical leader and project leader can be the same one.

Task assignment: The team leader should have his own over-all control to the progress of the team, and the task should be subdivided into indicators to be completed every week. But the premise of the detailed and reasonable task is sufficient communication and understanding between the team leader and the project leaders. The team leader has a good understanding of each project leader's ability and mentality, timely review project progress, and think about R&D (research and development) risks.

2. Will you recruit beginners in the first year? If so, what tasks will be assigned to them?

A: The main thing is to see their interests. As long as they interested in robots, they will find their positions in the team. Beginners will learn 2D drawing from laser engraving machine. After that, they will learn how to use the 3D printer to be more familiar with 3D graphics. In this way, they will gain the ability to design robots.

3. How did you recruit so many people at the beginning? What marketing tools are used? Activity experience on or off campus?

A: Setting up a tent on the lawn and displaying infantry cars makes students feel cool when they see them. Contact the person in charge of different building management advertisements to check the posters. If there is no bad information, the person in charge will help to display the propaganda materials.

4. Have you ever considered renting a site outside?

A: We built half of the venue ourselves; other teams can come to us if they need to debug.

5. Is there an advisor who is willing to help the active could solve the finical matter?

A: Yes, the professor will help coordinate resources.  But the premise is that the professor can be convinced so that he is also motivated to do this.

6. How much does the team spend in a year?  Where is the most expensive part except machining?

A: We spent 25,000 US dollars in a year, the most expenditure is the mechanical building.

7. Is the robot iteratively using aluminium profiles or other materials?

A: A large part of them are aluminium profiles, there are also fibreglass panels. The recommended aluminium profiles are available at http://www.zyltech.com/

8. How do your team get the operation authority of laboratory machinery and equipment?

A: First, we communicate with the professor, fix the personnel to operate the equipment. Then follow the college process, attend the training course, and the qualification will be obtained after the training is completed.

9. How do Chinese open source materials share with foreign teammates in the team?

A: The Chinese open source materials we use now mainly need to translate the drawings shared by the domestic team. The Chinese players in each of our sub-teams will work with the American team members to translate the main parts first, and then they will be able to understand the functions after opening in the software.

10. What are the general activities in the team, and how often?

A: If you are asking about entertainment, itis that if you stay up late in the lab, the team will contain the food. We have held a barbecue once.

11. How is the robot transported to Shenzhen?

A: Our first year and the second year are actually dismantled and shipped to the country in the trunk. After the game is finished in 2018, all the robots are shipped back by sea transportation.

12. When first attend the competition, how can you talk to the sponsor without making achievements? How to show/prove your team are reliable?

A: Because the support from the school is relatively large, therefore we did not contact with the many sponsors. However, we have also been in contact with some of them. First of all, the sponsors are not interested in getting more exposure through your team. Instead, they are valued people, hoping to make your team members become their potential workers.

For Chinese sponsors, the main points are:

1) The team itself: team performance, team talent, team technical ability;

2) The reputation of the team’s school;

3) Therefore, not all sponsors value the same point. You can cut in from different angles, focus on finding cooperation points, and then expand cooperation in various forms.

13. The contest contains a lot of content. How to explain it to people in a short time (2-5 minutes)?

A: The RM Organizing Committee has a video of its own. In the 2017 season, the rules are well explained by 3D animation. We generally put this video directly.

The English version of rules manual and competition information will be released on the official website each year. You can download the video and make your own introduction based on that.

14. The foreigners may have concerns when they are told the competition will be held in China. How do you deal with that?

A: We haven't encountered that problem. Most of the members think the competition is very cool and are willing to participate even if they can’t go. Meanwhile, we will cover apart of the flight ticket based on their contribution.

15. How to promote on Campus? Ours is not very effective right now.

A: Promote early and put as many posters as you can. And try your best to showcase the robots, that’s very appealing.

16. How to reject new students that are not skilled enough without discouraging them?

A: Actually, I don’t think there are students that are not skilled enough, there are only students that are not hardworking enough. If they are willing to learn and are passionate enough about the competition, they can find suitable positions in the team.

17. After recruitment, the average time of club activity is not very long considering that the engineering program schedule is very intense. Sometimes it's hard for students to adapt to the high-intensity developing environment. Are there any time management strategies? How to decide the meeting length, development time, and meeting regularity?

A: Our meeting time is usually on Sundays. We won’t have a fixed length for meetings as long as we can make everything clear. We will make specific deadlines for finishing certain tasks which all members agree on. We will then meet base on our schedules and progress.

Team development and robot parts manufacturing

1. How to deal with the unbalance of devices during CV development?  (We can only afford one Jetson, but multiple Raspberry Pis. The computing power of these devices is different.)

A: Try to update your device (pi is not powerful enough), and develop a bettering CPU processing algorithm (the traditional CV algorithm, analog operation) for pi to compute. Test if the program meets the minimum operation standard (about 25fps).  If you need special learning algorithm for the large identifier, use Jetson for it.

2. In CV development, what are the alternatives for the official armour module?

A: use the led light strip and TEFLON plate to simulate the side lights of the armour module. Use the laser cutting acrylic plates to replace the middle part of the module. And you can buy the red blue led, 0805 model. You can basically simulate the official module with these materials.

3. What’s your CV development timeline? What did you put the most effort on?

A: We make the timeline based on members’abilities. We actually put the most effort on teaching team members how to develop OpenCV, testing the possible solutions and debugging.

4. What camera did you use for CV?

A: ELFP USB Camera.

5. Can we use a webcam? Have you tried the global shutter camera? Have you tried auto-focus, automatic exposure or auto white balance on webcam?

A: You shouldn’t use auto exposure. Try to keep the image information consistent. Autofocus camera is too expensive. White balance should also be manually controlled.

6. Is it bad to use YOLO Tiny on Pi? Is it best to write scripts in OpenCV for Pi? If so, is it better for a beginner to learn OpenCV from cpp or Python?

A：We haven’t tried YOLO, Single Shot Detection requires CUDA and is not recommended. Any neural networks algorithm is not recommended for armour detection.

7. Is it better to use OpenCV from cpp or Python?

A: We recommend using cpp.

8. How do you simulate the light strips on the armour plate and the Rune?

Testing methods for the energy mechanism:

（1）Video simulation, using a screen or projector.

（2)  Customize parts depending on the specific trait you want to identify. This could be costly, there are teams who have produced their own energy mechanism.

（3）Official videos. Official videos will be coming up after New Years, you will be able to test your energy mechanism by following the videos.

9. How long did it take for the whole process of mechanical design, part production, assembly, and testing? Do you have recommendations for part and service providers?

A. We actually made a lot of mistakes in terms of time management for the 2018 competition. We wasted the first term planning and making no progress, we also did not utilize the time we got from winter break. Most of our progress was made in the months of May to July. After the final exams in May, our Standard Robot team designed two iterations in the span of ten days, and another iteration when we arrived in Shenzhen. Considering the difficulties of transportation, our team decided to meet up in China on June 1st to assemble and test the robot(after finishing our design around April), while making upgrades to our robot.

As for production, I would recommend Chinese part providers on Taobao, but due to inaccuracies in the design files, many of the parts we sent out for upgrade were not perfect, so I won’t be recommending any service providers here.

10. How do you split your budget between the robots?

A: We encourage every one of our members to generate ideas, and we will often try to implement the best of these ideas, so often we will be testing out different ideas at once, and we are much willing to spend in this part. With that being said, we would try to restrict our spending during the early production phase, by using reusable material that is easy to modify, such as wood, foam, aluminium, and 3D printing. This actually exposes our weakness in technical drawings, many parts could have been modelled and printed using computer software’s.

11. It is not something that can be learned from the classroom of using STM32 development board to write the control system or using the computer vision to identify the energy organs. When the team recruiting new members, some may have relevant experience while most of them are still rookies. Could seniors give some advice on how to train new members? According to your experience, what the percentage of inexperienced freshmen should be when recruiting new members?

A: First of all, it would be greatly helpful in terms of verses if a junior, a senior or even a graduate student majoring in CS could be found. As for the experience of the STM32 development version, one should have the ability to learn and get started after finishing 2534 microcontroller course. It is very lucky for us to have a bunch of capable and enthusiastic seniors. There is a cs senior teaching introduction of openCV from the basic image show to binarization. In the meantime, our cv team leader writes a set of test questions for which compilation is needed to see the content of topic and then you will have a rough evaluation of your code level with subsequent test questions. In the aspect of STM32, it might be more difficult to get started as the reason that there are currently around fifteen members working in the cv team. However, only four or five members on the embedded side are able to make it controlled with the board after being given a motor.

12. During the development and testing process, parts are worn or damaged sometimes due to various reasons. Based on your experience, will the performance of the Mecanum wheel be worn out to be affected before the competition? During the development process, will the damage appear for 3508 chassis motor ESC and 3510 PTZ motor? Will the LiPo battery performance experience a significant drop after four-month development and testing period?

A: The use of products need to follow the product specifications and the official has also introduced the corresponding contents, such as motor maintenance: https://bbs.robomaster.com/thread-7615-1-1.html

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