UIL 2019

By Ethan, Charlotte, Evan, Janavi, Beno, Benb, Bhanaviya, Abhi, Arjun, Jose, Aaron, Paul, Cooper, and Justin

Task: Compete at the Texas State Championship

Today, we competed at the Texas State Championship, UIL Robotics, Division 5A-6A. We finished our robot earlier this week, so this served as a testing ground for our new robot and code.

Judging and Awards

There is no presentation at UIL - the judges appear at the pit ad-hoc to ask questions. And, there are no real awards. In this case, we talked to the judges, and they enjoyed our robot, but they happened to watch the game where our robot failed to move due to the gears breaking, so we were not under consideration for any awards.

Talking to BAE Systems

Usually at UIl there is a special aisle dedicated to visiting colleges and companies who support FTC teams and want to watch the competition. This time one of the visiting compaines was BAE Systems. Janavi went and talked to one of their employees who was able to connect her to the Dallas team. We plan to contact them to learn more about how they use the conecpts we are learning their jobs. We also hope to be able to give them our presentation and a run down of our robot and its capabilites.

Code/Robot/Robot Game

As the robot was freshly built, we didn't have much coded before the tournament. The night before, we did some basic tuning and created an autonomous, but not much. This coding is detailed in an earlier post. Despite this, the autonomous performed reasonably well - we could reliably delatch and sample - our issues came up in scoring the team marker as we failed to consider that the team marker wouldn't fit in the redesigned intake.

The tournament also served as a stress test for Icarus. Two major issues cropped up: the belt system and the Superman arm. First, the belt system itself worked well - Icarus' arm extended quickly, but it repeatedly got caught on the lander's edge, detensioning the belt and requiring constant maintenance. Second, the gears on the Superman arm were stripped as we attempted to escape the crater in our first match. The stripping itself isn't surprising - Superman applies pressure on the gears' teeth on the order of mega-Pascals, but the quickness of stripping implies that the gears of Icarus do not fit together as well as BigWheel. So far, we plan to redesign the Superman arm with metal gears to reduce the stripping.

Game 1

We won. Our autonomous worked perfectly, but we overshot the crater while parking and got stuck (this was due to underestimating the speed of the 20's on our robot). Thus, we were completely stuck during teleOp, but our partner carried us.

Game 2

We lost. When we put the robot on the field, we realized that Superman's gears had stripped, but it was too late to change them out. So, we were stranded in the middle of autonomous and couldn't move beyond that.

Game 3

We lost. We hadn't fully repaired Superman, so we were again stranded on the field.

Game 4

We lost. We set up an untested autonomous, creating a point deficit we couldn't recover from.

Game 5

We won. Superman was fixed and our autonomous worked allowing us to pull ahead by 20 points and win the match.

Next Steps

These will be detailed in the UIL post-mortem.