Texas State and UIL Championship Post-Mortem

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

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

This weekend, Iron Reign participated in the FTC UIL Championship, which was mainly robot game, and the FTC Texas State tournament, where we advanced to FTC Worlds with the Think award, an award granted for the engineering portfolio and documentation. We learned a lot from our gameplay and communications with our alliance partners, and got the chance to see our robot in action properly for the first time. This is our analysis of our main strengths, weaknesses, and future opportunities and threats we will have to deal with before competing at Worlds.

Strengths:

• fast maintenance when things went wrong, both build and code related
• sticking to our own strategy
• being able to access all the junctions/ cover a lot of ground
• communication with alliances
• not being a hindrance to our alliance partners

Weaknesses:

• penalties for wrapping around poles and extending out of field
• long time required to recalibrate if setting up goes wrong
• no consistent gameplay
• turret movement is very choppy
• lack of time to modify UnderArm
• less time for testing because of complicated design
• cone gets dropped, especially during transfer

Opportunities:

• further optimizing transfer and transfer speed
• working on auton parking and cone scoring with transfer
• automating transfer
• we will have time to further finetune the robot

Threats:

• Nudge Stick is still a hindrance to game play
• lack of drive practice because design was prioritized
• robot pushes itself past what is mechanically possible
• robot relies on calibration, which isn't convenient