Competition 1: Glacier Peak

So, how did it go?

We had some great matches, and some... lessons learned.

2022-03-06

Also, I'm bad at taking pictures at competition. Here's literally the only photo I grabbed all weekend:

Drive team and mentor relaxing near the end of end. Competitions feel very long, especially after 2 years off.

Here's a good match:

And, here's a match where we... learned some stuff... :

 Over the weekend we learned 2 major lessons: 

    1. We had not tested our intake mechanism nearly enough, and it took 3 matches to remove broken parts, tighten up loose connections, and ensure we were consistent in scooping up the game pieces. 

    2. We learned that the climbing bars on the competition field behaved very differently to the test setup we had back in the lab. On the real field, the bars are aluminum, and especially as 2 robots are attempting to climb, they incur significant deflection as the weight swings and bounces over them. Our hooks were great against a solid bar, however, we constantly found ourselves needing to slow down and try to carefully time our maneuvers to not upset the balance, and drop our robot on the floor.

We may have... slightly... fallen 5 times over the course of the weekend.

The student who designed our climber understood the issue, was definitely sad during the competition as we found these issues, but come Monday, bounced back, had a great sense of humour about it, before starting back to work on making improvements!

Appropriate.

Competition over 2 days is broken into 2 main parts: qualifying rounds, and the elimination tournament. After each team got their 12 qualifying matches played, we still found ourselves in 6th place, and were selected to join the third ranked alliance to compete in the elimination rounds.

We competed alongside Lynnwood High School and Lincoln High School, but ended up getting knocked out in the semi-finals.

We did have one final positive moment, as we were awarded the Industrial Design Award, recognized by building a solid, well-integrated robot that effectively met all the games challenges. (We're pretty sure the judges saw our robot fall 5 times and yet we never missed a match...) - but we were pretty happy with it!

-B