First Season Scrimmage at Hedrick MS

By Trey, Bhanaviya, Ben, Jose, Justin, Aaron, Karina, and Cooper

Task: Compete and observe important things needed to continue the build of circle robot and for future competitions.

This Saturday Iron Reign attended the scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This scrimmage was for many rookies, the first exposure to a competition environment and the basic structures of team communication. Both the rookies and the returning team members had an opportunity to communicate with different teams and to get exposed to different ideas and their respective thought processes. Iron Reign used this scrimmage as a way to look at what robot designs were most effective and a lot of key aspects of the game we may have glossed over earlier in the season.

Many things determined a robot's effectiveness, for example, we noticed that the robots in the competition that did the best were the ones that had the most direct routes and were able to manipulate the stones efficiently and effectively. We also noticed that positioning and placing the stones on the towers was very difficult for us and the teams without programs that automatically line up the stacks. This strengthens our need for circle robot which when finished should be able to stack with much more precision than the average robot. The other thing that the circle robot would help with is lining up the arm to pick up stones which also proved to be very challenging for teams with grippers that need to grab a block in a certain orientation like us.

There were a lot of unexpected penalties that can change the tides of a game, for example, the human player can not place an object in the quarry if there is already an object in it. Doing this awards 15 points to the opposing team. Another thing we learned is that to receive the points from delivering a stone the robot must fully cross over the tape under the bridge. A lot of people with push-bots lost points because their robots didn't fully cross the tape. Overall, penalties and losing points were easy ways for a team to lose a match quickly and if we don't watch what we do we can potentially lose an entire competition because of them.

Next Steps

Our next steps are to keep working on the circle robot because it should be able to better complete the challenge. We also see like never before that even though this robot is not done, we still have Frankendroid and we still need to perpetually do driving practice with it because ultimately, the best teams will have the most driving practice. However, the biggest next step we are taking is that we are coming to practice more often because our first qualifier is so close but we are so far from a good robot. There is still a lot of work to do.