white noise

Warm temps are back again and our yard is coming alive!

The UGS/Live Oaks FIRST Robotics Team 158 competed in the Buckeye Regional in Cleveland this past weekend. This was the team’s second and final competition of the 2007 season. The size of this regional was much larger than our previous event in Pittsburgh (58 teams instead of 35) and the game play was very tough. Most teams (like ourselves) had already been to another regional and were either adept at scoring or playing aggressive defense.

The team made great use of our Thursday practice day by passing inspection, warming up their driving skills, and fine tuning the robot’s mechanics and programming. As we practiced, other teams got an early appreciation for our scoring ability and maneuverability. Although we had had completed one ramp and successfully tested its deployment, using it would’ve put us overweight by 3 or 4 pounds so we decided to proceed with only the scoring arm.

The game is played between two alliances of three robots each. Every qualifying match you play is with (and against) a new randomized alliance. Sometimes you get lucky and draw strong, complementary robots for your alliance, other times you must make do with less. In each match we played, the students were happy with our performance and contributions to the alliance. In some cases we played the role of primary scorer for our alliance; in other cases teams called upon us to play solid defense.

We competed in 7 qualifying matches on Friday. The students worked hard on and off the field and were very satisfied with our success throughout the day winning 4 of 7 rounds and tying for the highest match score of anyone that day.

We only had a single qualifying match remaining on Saturday morning. The previous day of aggressive driving had taken its toll on our drive system and we had to make some serious repairs to our transmissions. Luckily we got the drive train back in top shape just in time to take the field. Despite a hard effort we lost that final match giving us a qualifying record of 4 and 4, and a qualifying standing of 33rd of 58.
The elimination rounds began with the top eight teams selecting two alliance partners (like a draft in football or basketball) to take into the finals. Despite our modest ranking, we were recognized as a strong team player with a versatile robot, and the 4th seeded team selected us for their alliance. Considering that we had a much higher qualifying ranking in Pittsburgh (12th) and still missed the opportunity to play in the finals, the students were thrilled. In a best-of-three quarterfinal, our alliance won the first match by a large margin, but then narrowly lost the next two to keep us from advancing to the regional semifinal. All in all, it was a great finish to the season!

So it stinks our team didn’t get into the quarterfinals in Pittsburgh, but it was fun to watch. One of the things I’ll remember most is the sight of one of the winning team’s mentors…a big burly guy, maybe 6’5″ and 250lbs..wiping tears from his eyes, as he gave each kid on his team a big bear hug lifting them off the ground. Whoever said engineers aren’t emotional has never gone to an FRC event.

The UGS/Live Oaks FIRST Robotics Team competed in the Pittsburgh Regional competition this past weekend.

Thursday was a full day of fine-tuning and practice. Our team spent the entire day 8am to 8pm working on completing the robot to get it ready for the competition matches on Friday. Our driver and operator only got one practice round in at the end of the day, because there was so much left to complete. For those of you familiar with our design, we decided to focus on the grabber and worry about adding the ramps later. By the end of the day, we had completed the lift and grabber assembly, passed inspection, and (without ramps) passed the weight limit with flying colors (we were 100 pounds of a possible 120).

The competition matches began on Friday and our team got off to a rocky start losing their first two rounds. As we continued to fine tune the robot’s drivetrain and as our student driver got more experience we starting doing much better. The Cobras played some very impressive defense and consistently scored bonus points for climbing alliance robots’ ramps. Likewise we climbed in the rankings throughout the day as we won the next 5 of 6 matches. The team climbed as high as 6th place and ended the first day in a very respectable 8th place of the 35 teams in Pittsburgh.

When competition resumed on Saturday we implemented an offensive strategy to surprise our opponents (who would assume we’d continue playing defense) and consistently placed three scoring tubes. We split our two Saturday qualifying rounds, giving us a final ranking of 12th and a record of 6 – 4. Although the team narrowly missed the opportunity to advance into the quarterfinals, our drive team and our robot are in very good shape for our next regional in Cleveland in two weeks.