Event 3: District Championship!

Event 3: District Championship

"Let's go watch some robots!" a father called out to two small children as they walked down the hill toward Reese Court on the Eastern Washington University campus. Inside, 50 teams from Washington and Oregon were competing on a competition field that, more so than ever, represented a professional sporting or showcase event. A full lighting gantry, real-time commentary, post-match analysis featuring real-time analytics, heatmaps, replays. All of this, for science and technology - for robots. (How amazing is that?)

This is the greatest show!

Oh hey, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last Sunday, April 2nd, we finished our second event in Auburn High school, and earned a spot to compete at the District Championship. It was an amazing accomplishment, but we barely had time to celebrate. This bus to Spokane, WA would leave Weds at 8am (a 4.5-5 hour drive, for those unfamiliar).

Monday at noon, the team reconvened, and immediately took the robot apart.

Again.

This time it was definitely in 2, or 3 pieces.

Yep, not even 24 hours after placing second, we had the robot in a few major pieces. Our elevator tubes were once again thrashed (See the pictures in our Auburn Event post!) and needed replacement. For this event, we chose a tube with 1/8" thick walls, instead of the 1/16" used in the last change-out. If we performed well and qualified for World's, we wouldn't have time to replace these again. There was some amount of risk - it had taken us three days to manufacture spares and replace the tubes last time. Using stronger material would also increase weight - dynamic, high weight at that.

But after two events, this was no longer a high school robotics team, this was a practiced, professional pit crew. Music played in the shop, some wholesome and friendly jokes got tossed around, and everyone got to work.

New tubes were made, the old tubes removed, and 6 hours later the robot was back together. (Reminds me of the good ole' days...)

More preparations were made for this event and possible eventualities. We finished preparing our spare intake - with 4 bolts we could install a replacement in just a few minutes, if we damaged this critical mechanism.

Twins!

It's still really hard to get a picture of software - but I promise you we made software changes! The major software change was more a shuffling of existing code - making helper classes and functions more accessible, so that we could more easily use them in robot commands. Want one button press to lift the elevator to position, deploy the intake, and start spinning the intake wheels? Boom done. All possible improvements once we cleaned up where and how each subsystem state could be accessed and used. Our drivers loved it.

Like a 6-hour unbag, without the bag.

With the robot back together (again), software changes tested (again), spare components ready for battle (first time!), and improved packing (we made a list this time!), we loaded up the van and the bus, and on Wednesday drove across the state.

Not a bad stop for lunch!

It's a lovely state, too!

District Championships would be a beast of a competition. We were used to two-day events with 30 teams. Matches happened quickly, teams had to rush any fixes and get to their next matches. Here, 50 teams would play through 100 total matches over 3 days. We sometimes had more than an hour between matches.

Incremental improvements to our pit at every event!

Here, teams had to be perfect. Alongside the competition field was a full-sized practice field. Teams could continue to tune or build new skills in the downtime. Teams that had issues had the time to correctly repair and replace parts. This was a game that could see perfection - a rarity in that a maximum score did exist - 193 points. 3 robots needed to complete a perfect autonomous routine, fill every possible game piece, then all 3 balance together in the endgame. Qualification match 82 happened. 3 powerhouse teams placed together by the randomness of the match scheduler. 150 seconds later, a score of 192 appeared on the board. One point was missed during the autonomous period, one point shy of perfection. Hot dang, yet, so many congrats!

(Watch the red alliance.)

For us, those 72 hours felt an awful lot like 3 days. The Qualification Schedule random-ness was not as kind to us as it could have been... A fair number of times we would play opposite our good friends, and very few times would we play with them. Our primary plan never changed - score our game piece and balance in autonomous, score 5-7 game pieces during tele-op, and balance again at the end of each match. We were most consistent delivering 6-7 game pieces in tele-op. A few times we did not make life easy for ourselves or our partners when attempting to balance multiple robots. As the second day came to a close, the competition field was showing its own wear and tear, and our simple, dead reckoning autonomous program wasn't able to adapt. By the end of day Friday, our record looked abysmal, showing 1-7-1, down in 42nd place. Here, the job was to simply keep the energy up - we were at District Champs! Despite our record, we were scoring as many or more points than ever! While it was low - the energy did remain. Our final three matches loomed, our strategy stayed mostly the same. we performed just a few minor tweaks to ensure our consistency. Little things seem to have a big impact!

We spent a lot of time on the practice field ourselves!

Each match came - we scored in auto, we scored more in tele-op, and we balanced in the endgame - and we won! Twice, and three times again! Each match helped - we knew we had a good robot, we knew it performed. and in our very last qualification match, we were having so much fun, we decided to end with a little bit of flair:

Maybe not the most accurate, but it did score!

Our final record showed 4-7-1, and brought us to 35th in the rankings. The data told a slightly different story. Teams will watch every match, mark every score, and aggregate all the data for all the teams using tools like Tableau to visualize who performs well, despite their ranking or match schedule.

Depending on whose data one looked at, we were solid top 20 material, one posting showing us as the 9th best scoring team at the event! Once again, our reliability and consistency helped massively - we played every second of every match, with no mechanical or electrical failures! Alliance selection is where the top 8 ranked teams choose their partners for elimination. We had done our part, showed what we could do, and had to hope that one alliance out there liked the show that we put on.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. We ended up not being selected for an alliance. Because of that, we did not have enough points to qualify for World's.

Energy levels went down again. (We were all just tired as well. If the adrenaline goes, you feel it!)

Still though - what a season. This team last year ranked 106th in the PNW District. This year (after everything settled,) we ranked 25th. (Statbotics says we are the 4th most improved team in the world. We met and exceeded our team goals set at the beginning of the season! We built an amazing robot. We met new friends. We had a lot of fun.

I posted this to the team Sunday after the event:

Bearcats!

What a season. What a robot. What a team!

Re-posting some of this, as I know not everyone was able to attend District Champs. We appreciated all the cheering and team spirit from afar!

The first weekend of January, we were given a game manual. No parts, no instructions, just some dimensions, a list of how to score points, and restrictions for how big and heavy a robot could be. It took us 5 weeks to build a <highly> capable and competitive robot. Through continuous improvement, we claimed two Finalist Awards, one of those as an Alliance Captain, and a Quality Award, recognizing our robust robot, strategic planning, and team. We attended District Championships for the first time and - backed by the robot stats - we were competing with the best of PNW. And the PNW is a <very> competitive district. In the lower bracket here, a 181 point loss would have won many other District Championships that were played this past week. Simply amazing.

Right from load-in, students and mentors came to our pit recognizing the M, congratulating us and our robot. Some admitted they didn't really know who the Bearcats were - they do now. Several friends on other teams are excited to see what we do next year. :-)

What I saw this week was amazing. Ups and downs, surely, some elation, some disappointment. I'm most proud to see the effort and inspiration of just being at DCMP. That drive to do something a little more, tune a bit more, get one more session on the practice field to get 1% better. (I also appreciate that we kept our pit clean, our food area, and the stands clean!)

So once again, thank you all. I hope everyone learned, I hope everyone had fun, I hope everyone was gracious toward another student/mentor/volunteer. I am so honored and proud to be a Bearcat!

I share the same feeling as a number of our friends - I can't wait to see what we do next year!