Mansfield Competition - Off to Regionals

By Darshan

Task: Compete at Mansfield successfully

This past weekend the team was at the Mansfield competition hoping to make it past the qualifier. Although we were more prepared by packing early, as the competition was far away, we were still rushed the next morning. We were able to get our scissor lift to properly deploy along with the skilift. We ("we" being drivers Max and Lin) were not able to get much time at driver practice though, decreasing our ability to score. We went into the competition with little to no autonomous, but were able to get a simple "drive straight forward" autonomous made so we could at least do something. Throughout the competition day we improved our autonomous, but were unable to test it due to our match schedule. We had a basic game plan, similar to that at the UTD qualifier, which was to play defense and score rolling goals up the ramp. We started off the day on the wrong foot with some RobotC problems messing with Program Chooser in the first match (which we lost, although it may have not mattered) preventing us from driving during tele-op. We won 3 out of 5 of the qualifying matches and were able to make it into the semifinals as the 6th place team overall. We won the PTC Design Award and were finalists for the Journal Award. After some failed politics we were selected into the 3rd alliance and after an EVENTFUL finals our alliance won first place and moved on to the regionals.

Reflections:

Thankfully, besides the many errors we were able to qualify and will continue updating the blog through our changes to help us at UTA. We will continue to develop our autonomous along with making physical changes and additions to the robot. We hope to use this competition experience to better our robot.