Issaquah Robotics Log
2006 FIRST Competition

Build Period: Week 1 - Week 2 - Week 3 - Week 4 - Week 5 - Week 6
Competition Period: Pacific Northwest Regional - Fix-it Window - Davis/Sacramento Regional

On Thursday we unpacked the robot, finished a few small tasks, and passed inspection after shaving 1/8" off our width. Most of the day was spent doing practice competitions and making improvements to the robot and software.

Our robot took a real beating in the practice matches. Some teams were being overly aggressive in defense and smashed the roller on the front of our robot, bending an axle I thought was indestructible. We added a bar to protect that spool and axle, and that bar got smashed in -- see the photo on the right. So we bent it back and put in another brace and haven't had a problem since. It was actually really great that we found that problem on Thursday so we could get it fixed before the real matches.

As usual, we finished up the trinkets in the hotel lobby:

Friday, we played in seven seeding matches. The first two went really well, and we started out with two wins. Then we went on to win the next two as well! In our fifth match, one robot in our alliance wasn't working and couldn't play. The other robot fell over in the first part of the match, so it was mostly three against one. We lost. This put us in eighth place at lunch. The sixth match was close and had some judging errors which may have been big enough to change the outcome. That's part of the game, too. Our seventh match was a resounding success, a hard-fought match that went well and gave us a record of five wins and two losses. We're ranked 10th out of 46 teams, a very good showing.

We have three matches Saturday morning, then we'll be ranked and go through the process where the top eight teams choose two partners to form alliances that will compete in the finals in the afternoon.

The team is doing a great job. After Thursday's repairs and upgrades, our robot has performed well and needed minimal maintenance. (Some teams are still doing serious building!) We've made steady improvements in the software, although we still haven't scored during the autonomous portion yet, maybe tomorrow. Our drive team is getting steadily better.

The rest of the team and also some of the parents have been doing an awesome job of recording how each robot performs in every round. As of 12:15 am Friday night/Saturday morning, the core scouting team had sorted the teams into groups according to how much we'd like to have them as partners. I believe the piles are something like: yes, no, and meh. They will correlate info with the drive team and do live updates for the last matches tomorrow so we can go into the alliance choosing process prepared to make good choices in partners based on real performance reports, not just their win/loss record (which can be strongly influenced by the random match-ups).

24 of the 46 teams will be involved in the finals. If we do well and win at least two of our three remaining matches, we could end up heading an alliance. The worst we can do is finish 5 and 5, so we'll be in the top half of the teams.

On the ride home, I had a horrible dream: that our team had done well enough to finish 16th out of 46 and yet not be among the 24 teams selected to compete in the finals.

The good news: Cathy was driving.

The bad news: it wasn't a dream, that's what happened.

In our three matches today, we won one and lost two. Both losses were close and well played by both sides. In one, we managed to totally shut down one of the most dominating robots at the competition, not allowing them to score a single ball during the driver portion.

Overall, our robot worked well. Our team was wonderful, working hard at everything and spending a bunch of time helping other teams. I'm very proud of the entire team and only disappointed with the sometimes unfathomable choices some teams made in picking alliance partners for the finals.

The good news is that we have good ideas for how to improve our robot and strategy at our next event, the Davis/Sacramento Regional, in 3 weeks.

Build Period: Week 1 - Week 2 - Week 3 - Week 4 - Week 5 - Week 6
Competition Period: Pacific Northwest Regional - Fix-it Window - Davis/Sacramento Regional