Competition at UTD

By Omar

Task: Have success in tournament despite incomplete robot

The team spent the weekend at UTD at a qualifier. We were not able to complete the scissor lift before competition and had a very simple game plan for each match. Our robot was (is) basically a brick, so we played defense. What we were able to do, however, is get s small servo on the back of the robot that operates a sort of clamp. This clamp's job is to clamp (duh) onto the base of the rolling goals, so we could drag them around. When not defending our ally, who was (hopefully) scoring balls into goals, we ("we" being our drivers Max and Lin) focused on pulling rolling goals up ramps, which were worth points.

Our autonomous did not work either. In reality, it was never really written. We experimented with it at the competition, but other RobotC-related problems arose that prevented us from actually testing. Other robots had autonomous programs that actually functioned extremely well, so we allowed them to do what they wanted with those. Watching these gave us some ideas on how to effectively write ours. As of yet, no testing has been done, but we will do some as soon as our robot is up and ready to go.

Despite all of our failures, we won 4 games out of the 5 we played in the qualifying matches, and made it into the semifinals as the 4th place team overall. We were hoping that our sister SEM team, Imperial Robotics, would allow us to choose them to be a member of our Alliance, but they made a compact with another team (the 3rd place team), so they were picked already. We sent Jayesh to make a quick decision on which two teams to choose, and he chose quite well; he decided to ask the two teams who had gotten the highest combined score of the day to join us, both of which accepted. We then proceeded to lose two consecutive matches, which eliminated us. Sadly, two things we were expecting to happen did not happen: firstly, we were hoping to win the Creo award for our extensive use of it and 3D-printed parts, but we did not; secondly, we were hoping to actually qualify for the regional tournament, which we also did not. The 6 teams who were in the 1st and 2nd place alliances passed through.

Reflections:

Hopefuly, with this additional week, we can fix the things that need fixing and do the things that need doing in order to have a better chance at the next qualifier. Also, going into a qualifier completely unprepared might have not been the best idea.