This January, we attended our first two competitions of the year: Who Let The Bots Out in Canton, MA on January 13 and RoboStorm 3.1 in Andover, MA on January 27.
We are really proud of how our first meet went! Although it was originally scheduled for December 9, an inconvenient snow storm pushed it until January. Despite our disappointment, we used the extra time to add even more mechanisms to our robot.
In autonomous, we consistently managed to score 85 points by hitting the jewel and getting the glyph in the correct column. However, we found that we often hit the jewel into the cryptobox, making the placement of glyphs tricky in teleop.
Our glyph mechanism worked nicely and most runs, we managed to score upwards of two rows and a column. We did find that it was slow at scoring, which we hoped to improve after the meet.
One of our favorite parts of the meet was trying out four new drive coaches. It was great for them to gain experience and confidence on the competition field.
After the qualifying matches, we were delighted to learn that we were the first seed alliance. We chose team 11100, We Are Robo, as our alliance partners, and in the end, we were proud to be the winning alliance!
At the end of the meet, we won the Design Award and are excited to have qualified to compete at the Massachusetts State Tournament!
At our second qualifier, we were excited to try our new vacuum pump mechanism to score the relic. We had been working with the idea of using suction, to pick up and deliver the relic since late November, and were excited to actually implement it on our robot, and test it out in competition. We managed to deliver the relic to the 3rd zone, standing up most of the time, and we are currently hard at work making even more improvements.
Thanks to the programmers’ hard work and dedication, we were able to program the robot to place a second glyph in autonomous. Sometimes it managed to get a second glyph block partially into the cryptobox, but during other runs, it missed completely.
We ended up as the second seeded team for alliance selection, and we were thrilled to be picked by the first seeded team, team 9867, Evolution. Through our teamwork, we became the winning alliance. We also won the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award!
It was really fun to meet all the other teams and their robots at these two competitions. We can’t wait for the Vermont State Tournament on February 24 and the Massachusetts State Tournament on March 3. See you there!
Gearticks 