Build Period:
Week 1
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Week 2
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Week 3
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Week 4
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Week 5
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Week 6
PNW Regional:
Wednesday
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Thursday
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Friday
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Saturday
As told by Tom Saxton
We were assigned to the first match of the day, so we had to queue up pretty early. Kris, Kyle and Tom went over early for some more driving practice and to beat on the second autonomous mode some more. Kyle made some improvements to his stacking technique.
The first match went very well and our alliance won by a good margin. Although we had a glitch during autonomous and didn't score the hanging tetra, the drive team set a new team record stacking three tetras on top of goals with just under 30 seconds remaining. Had there been a need, we probably could have stacked a fourth, but for the game situation, it was better to just run back to the end zone for the 10 point bonus. With this level of performance, we could conceivably score a total of five tetras in a match. It was awesome to watch.
Our performance was in fact so awesome that it was easy to overlook the fact that one robot on the opposing alliance didn't ever move. At the end of the match, the officials starting looking into why that happened and found a problem with the field, so we would have to re-run the match. After a long series of short delays, they finally announced that teams could swap or charge their batteries.
It must have taken over an hour to get the field working again. During this time, teams that weren't on the field or queued up, got an extra hour to work on their robots. We would have loved to have had another hour to turn the controls, perfect the autonomous maneuver and get in a slice of driver practice. Instead, we set on the field, knowing we would have to re-run a match we thought we had won.
Finally, after the field was fixed, we narrowly lost the rematch 23 to 25. It was a devastating loss, a real letdown coming off of a beautiful performance.
In the second match, we had a bit of trouble getting the tetra off of the autoloader, then the tetra got wedged in the wrist joint and wouldn't come loose. Finally, the drive team managed to dislodge the tetra, but was not able to stack even a single goal. Our alliance lost 49 to 15.
The third match was also pretty unpleasant, our worse loss of the regional, 59 to 3.
Our record after the seeding matches was 3 and 7. This placed us somewhere around 24th place (22nd or 25th, depending on which conflicting stats from FIRST you believe). There were 37 teams there and 24 make it into the finals, so we were optimistic we'd get picked. Our team and robot were better than our record would indicate, with a few close losses, one loss from a partner's penalties and one great performance erased by a field glitch (of course, to be fair, the other side had one robot disabled by the field glitch, so it wasn't a fair match). We just had to hope that at least one team in control of choosing alliance partners would recognize what we could bring to an alliance in the finals.
To our shock, we were not picked. There were teams we were quite convinced were not as strong as we were that were invited into an alliance. It was a huge disappointment for the team.
Still, there was a shred of hope. Each alliance has three teams, but needs all three teams on the field. In previous competitions, there were only two teams on the field, so if one robot had some sort of failure, there was one available to run in its place. In the three-on-three format, losing one robot would cripple the alliance. So, there's a mechanism whereby an alliance with a broken robot can draft a fourth member from the teams not originally chosen. So, we worked hard on getting a third autonomous mode working and we added a protective piece to the upper arm to prevent a tetra from getting lodged they way it had in the day's second match.
Meanwhile, in a horrific re-enactment of the morning's start and last year's finals, there were more problems with the field. There was a huge delay before the first match of the quarter finals, more than enough time for us to work through a bunch of issues and get our first autonomous mode involving moving the base working. We finally got a mode working and calibrated that would allow us to be the robot that starts with a tetra, placed in the center starting position, and maneuver the robot into position to drop a tetra on the center goal just a few seconds after the drivers get control of the robot.
So, finally after we've been eliminated from the competition, we have a robot that is working better than ever before, controls that are working well for the drivers, the drive team has enough practice to be working well in competition, and we have three autonomous modes that work reliably. We even had the robot re-weighed since we had added a few small components since we were first inspected. Our weight was up to 119.8 pounds, so we still had some weight to work with: 0.2 lb..
We got all of this done before the first match of the quarter finals, so were able to watch all of the matches. They were a lot of fun to watch, some of the alliances worked really well and put on a great show. There were good, close matches, even a tie, along with a few dominating blow outs. It was sort of hard to watch an alliance which we thought would have better with our robot on the field, but it was still great to see so much good engineering and team work.
Build Period:
Week 1
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Week 2
-
Week 3
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Week 4
-
Week 5
-
Week 6
PNW Regional:
Wednesday
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Thursday
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Friday
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Saturday