2019 NC State Championship
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Robot Features
Our robot had new features: a physical arm limiter and reinforcements to the claw.
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Claw
We changed our claw design and "reinforced" it by putting a steel bar over it. The claw itself was stronger than the old claw, but the reinforcing bar messed up the trajectory of the cap, and sometimes the robot would end up releasing the cap on the same side as it was when it picked it up. We had this claw for the first 6 rounds before the lunch break. During the lunch break, we removed the reinforced claw, and replaced it with our original claw.
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Arm Limiter
We put two angles attached to the chassis as rests for the arm. We added it so that the arm wouldn't scrape the ground. The idea was good, and when we tried it out, it worked perfectly fine, until Qualifier Round 43, where our arm got stuck on the limiter. During the lunch break, we turned those two shorter angles into one longer one, which prevented the arm to get stuck.
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Skills Challenge
We didn't do as well as we hoped in the Skills Challenge. Although we got our expected 15 points from one Driver attempt, our Programming part didn't work well. The robot traveled too far in the first attempt, and at one point, it was running into the flagpole. The encoders in the motors stopped the program entirely, and we only scored 5 points. During the second attempt, we changed the distance the robot traveled between the second and third flag. But unfortunately, after the robot hit both the middle and bottom flag, it got slightly misaligned. That caused it not to flip any more caps to the red color or toggle any more flags, but it managed to park. That attempt got us 9 points.
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Tournament
We weren't lucky with the tournament either. We got paired against a whole lot or really good teams in the Qualifiers. We only won 4 matches and lost 3 matches due to the tough schedule and our reinforced claw being unable to flip caps easily. We were in 20th place for the Alliance Selection. Despite our rank, we managed to become the alliance captain for the 13th alliance, and we picked 9064D - "Area 51 Robotics" as our partners. We were eliminated the Round of 16: our robot got trapped in the net during autonomous period (but we still won autonomous bonus!), then our robot got locked up with opponent in the middle of the match, and after that, our robot overturned while trying to push the opponent out off the platform 8 seconds before the end of the match. Our alliance partner tried either get our robot upright, or push it out of the way and park themselves. But they ran out of time, and we lost by 4 points that round.
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