Our first National Competition!
The team and the robot flew Alaska Airlines to San Francisco to participate in the Signature Event - Google VEX Turning Point Tournament (Middle School). We made a special carry case for the robot out of 2 cardboard boxes (18" and 20" cubes) and lots of bubble-wrap, and put it into a custom-made waterproof heavy-duty fabric bag.
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Robot Features
This is the first time we are testing out new 14-point Skills Programming code on a competition field. We added a gyroscope to make precise turns (with deceleration at the end of the turn to minimize inertia), and we added 2 horizontal bars at the front of the robot, so now we can toggle low flags by either moving backward or forward.
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Skills Challenge
We did really well in Driver Skills and scored 15 points. We only had one attempt at Programming Skills (the line was over 1 hour long!), and the robot was a bit off the track and collided with the flag pole rather than toggling the flag in the middle of the program. But it was still able to flip the last cap and climb the bonus platform, and we scored 11 points. We were placed 12th with a combined score of 26.
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Tournament
In the competition, we only lost 1 out of 6 matches, and finished in 15th place among 70 teams. We had 9 Win Points, 20 Autonomous Points, and 69 Strength of Schedule Points. We were invited to join the 5th alliance, and got paired up with team 8153A Neird Nation from Michigan. We won both Round of 16 and Quarterfinals, but lost the Semifinal match to Alliance#1, who won the tournament and advanced to VEX Worlds.
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We are really proud of our quick reaction in various challenging situations during the game. Our robot was tipped over, and we managed to get it up and climb the bonus platform on time. Once our alliance partners mistook us for the opponent robot and tried to push us off the platform, but we resisted and did not fall off. In one of the matches we burned the claw motor and V5 Brain port, but we still managed to toggle flags and even flip caps with non-functional claw, and prevented the opponent from parking on alliance platform. It was quite an experience!
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