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.
