NTX Regionals Post-Mortem

By Aarav, Anuhya, Georgia, Gabriel, Trey, Vance, Alex, Krish, and Jai

Discuss the events of Regionals, analyze our performance, and prepare future plans

This past Saturday, team 6832 Iron Reign participated in the NTX Regionals Championship at Marcus High School. Overall, despite some robot performance issues, we won the Motivate award, meaning we advanced to both the UIL State Championship and FTC State Championship. Today, 2 days after the competition, we had our Regionals Post-Mortem, and below are our main strengths, weaknesses, potential opportunities, and threats.

Strengths:

• Motivate game was quite strong -> Figure of 1500 kids at two outreach events was quite impactful
• Presentation
• Should work on arrangement of members, some were off to the side and couldn’t do their slides -> Potentially utilize CartBot and a monitor
• Meeting with judges went generally pretty well
• Portfolio is quite well constructed and unique
• Well-practiced portfolio/presentation team(lots of improvement from last time)
• Shoulder of the robot was strong
• Rails were bending; tension too tight.
• Switching to carbon fiber resulted in a far stronger robot that did not crack
• Turret was much more capable of moving the extended crane
• Even worked well in fast mode -> probably could increase the speed of our articulations

Weaknesses:

• The need to sleep
• Team burnout
• Significant under planning
• Entanglement of springy cable on junctions during auton
• Arm does wide arcs sometimes, articulations not working half the time
• Lack of driving practice
• Cone placement accuracy
• Navigation to final position speed
• Connect game compared to other top teams
• Turning down an Innovate panel
• Robot Demo in judging
• No reliable auton
• If auton goes bad, effects extend into tele-op. The dependence is nice when auton is working but a hindrance when it needs to work.
• No reliable wheels that rotate straight which messes up auton
• Underarm wheels not working well and the cable management is still out of wack
• Placement of certain components on the robot
• Should have made it more clear to new recruits that this was crunch time and expectations for attendance are way up
• Coordination in pre competition prep
• Our funding situation is really bad. We are way over extended on deficit and Mr. V is not putting more money in

Opportunities:

• Booth at the pits with detailed banners
• Good robot == good judging
• Completing the robot puts us in the running for more technical awards
• Build Freeze
• A fully functioning robot with the transfer that can win matches would put us in Inspire contention somewhat
• Synchronization with transfer would be impressive in a control sense as well
• Strengthening our motivate outreach
• Spring Break
• A larger team to better spread the workload leading up to State
• Curved Nudge hook
• Drive practice
• Need more on the left side. We are becoming a liability for our partners to side limitations in terms of driver practice.
• Code Testing
• Maintenance for parts that were previously underdone/not to our standards
• Live robot demo
• Time to improve our connect game
• Judges for control award wanted to see more sensors
• Nudgestick + cone gripper
• Mechavator Reveal
• Cart Bot
• Matching shirts and hats

Threats:

• Our Connect game is significantly weaker than the competition
• Technic Bots won Inspire twice
• They had good outreach as well
• They also have an underarm & it is very much working well
• We have 3 weeks to code an entire robot
• 9 advance from state to worlds so we cannot rely on Motivate again, we need a stronger award, also most likely cannot just place 2nd for any award so Think Winner should be our absolute minimum goal or Inspire 3r
• Mr. V unavailable for a number of days leading up to State