Saturday 14 March
As we started on Saturday, we were confronted with some issues in the first few matches that caused us to break mid match and subsequently be unable to continue competing in these matches. We traced the troubles down to a few wires and repaired them. Then we had some trouble with scoring. We changed the compression of the turret to fix this and started scoring as we had at Monarch.
But wait there’s more.
In our 8th match, or robot stopped responding mid match again. After the match we discovered another different broken wire. We fixed this one and replaced a couple other wires as a precaution. In our final match of the day we performed much better and scored nearly all of our alliance points. A great swing from our first match of the day.
This allowed us to finish the day ranked 27.
Sunday 15 March
Saturday was a challenging day, but we did get the kinks worked out of the robot and it performed well in our Sunday matches. By the last qualifier, we were ranked 21 out of 34 teams. We were picked by the 8th seeded alliance in the playoffs, where the robot continued to perform well. We lost our first playoff match against the first seed alliance, won our second playoff match and the third match was where the controversy occurred. If you were watching, you saw that Match 10 had to be replayed. Our alliance initially won the match but one of the other alliance’s robots had been disabled for much of the match. One of those teams protested. It was determined that a ball had hit the emergency stop button for the team’s drivers station, disabling their robot. The decision made by the officials was to replay the match. Per standard FIRST procedure, there was no review of the match video. We lost the replay and were eliminated at that point. That was a very disappointing development for us, to say the least.
All of that said, once we got the teething problems solved the robot consistently worked well. You should all be proud of the robot you designed and built. Any time you move a complex combination of hardware and software from a test environment to a real environment, unexpected issues will crop up. You solved those issues and after that, there was little to do except checking for wear and tear and repairing damage from getting hit. Great job everyone!
For more details
TheBlueAlliance’s website is an accessible way to see details about the competition, including individual match videos. https://www.thebluealliance.com/team/138
Aftermath
Back at Monarch, we are working on changing the robot in ways that we hope will improve our performance at our next competition April 2-4 in Burlington, VT. While not completely disassembled, major components have been removed leaving a relatively bare base.
