Match Play at North Texas Regional Championship

By Trey, Ben, Aaron, Bhanaviya, Jose, Cooper, Justin, Karina, Paul, Shwan, Mahesh, and Anisha

Task: Compete in Qualification and Finals matches

Today Iron Reign competed at the North Texas Regional Championship with TomBot which was a mess, to say the least. But regardless of this, we were still able to win a few matches and qualify for worlds, which we should be able to do much better in. But regardless of this, we were still able to be in the winning alliance and the following are descriptions of the match play that made that happen. For reference, we have a separate post underlining the analysis of the qualifier that does not include match analysis. This post merely details how each one of our matches went, and we will have a future post discussing our drive issues at the competition.

Match 1(Quals 2)

We lost this match 51-148 because our robot contributed almost nothing to the alliance’s total score. What we did contribute consisted of two stacked blocks and parking. The other points in the match came from the other robot which stacked 4 blocks into a tower that later fell. However, their auto did the most for the outcome, racking up a total of 12 points. Overall, it was a pretty disappointing match that set the tone for the rest of the day.

Match 2(Quals 7)

At this point, most of us were thinking “this couldn’t get worse, could it?”. But we were very wrong. The reason why we lost this match 20-64 was that we were prevented from running the calibration sequence before the match. This plus a Vufora fail at the start of the match made our arm stuck at a 45-degree angle for the whole match. And on top of that, the other robot in our alliance disconnected. The only points we made were from moving the foundation out of the building zone and parking in the end game.

Match 3(Quals 13)

Continuing on the downward slope, somehow we managed to do worse with a functional arm. Losing this match 14-67, this may have been the lowest point of the day. Some of the faults with our robot in the match were being the only team without an auto, taking more than 10 seconds to pick up a block, repeatedly dropping blocks, and not parking in time.

Match 4(Quals 20)

After seeing us stoop as low as we did last match, the head judge, Freid, decided that he needed to talk to us and try to get us to do better. He gave us an inspirational speech about how we are going to have to live with the results of the competition for the rest of our lives and when we look back we would regret it if we didn’t give it our all. This helped us pick up our act and things started to get better. However, our robot disconnected mid-match and we lost 15-77.

Match 5(Quals 29)

Somehow the combination of 8 matches worth of time to prepare for the next match and Freid’s talk picked us up enough to win this match. With a lead of 9 points, we won our first match of the day 65-56. However, as seen by the low margin, this doesn’t mean our robot is never going to lose another match again. There were still many problems like how our auto still didn’t function and how the gripper still took to long to pick up blocks.

Match 6(Quals 33)

This was our last and most successful match of the day. We won 75-64, however, once again it should not go without mention that our alliance partners scored most of these points and stacked over half of the 6 stone tall tower. But it is also important to mention that our robot, and more importantly our drivers, preformed way better in this match than any of the other matches so we were clearly making progress.

Next Steps

After reading a short summary of the disappointing match play we had at regionals, it would be easy for one to point their finger at a particular team involved in the physical build and design of the robot. However, these results are a result of a failure to collaborate between teams and preform within teams. For example, it was common to see builders and coders need the robot at the same time. The solution to this problem was building a second version of the robot so that coders have their own robot and builders have their own robot. This will reduce friction between the two teams and overall, increase the efficiency of the overall team which will put us in a better spot for worlds, where we will hopefully not lose 4 matches.