FIRST - Milwaukee Day 3

[Saturday March 15th]
Well here’s the summary of the weekend! The weekend started out fairly rough but ended awesome. We got two new trophies! One trophy is for being part of the alliance in the final rounds. A second trophy is for winning the Engineering Inspiration Award. If you want the details, keep reading…

Thursday at the competition is a practice day set up for most teams to work the bugs out of their systems. We took most of the morning on Thursday to make various electrical updates to clean up a ‘crows nest’ of wires and then turned the robot over to software to implement several updates. One major update gave the robot the ability to navigate ¾ of a lap in 15 seconds without a driver. This allowed us to gain critical points at the beginning of the match. During the practice matches the driver and operator had several communications issues and the robot ended the last two matches on its back with no way to recover. It appeared to be the makings for a very long weekend, but it was better to get the bugs worked out then than during the regular matches.

Friday during the qualifying rounds we ran very well. We lost our first match, won the next four, and lost our last match of the day. We ended the day with a record of 4 wins and 2 losses and were ranked 14^th out of the 60 teams attending. We didn’t like the losses, but felt good about our performance mainly because we were the primary scoring robot and were getting better with every match.

Saturday morning we had two remaining qualifying matches with good alliance teams and won the matches. At the end of the qualifying rounds we had a record of 6 wins and 2 losses and were ranked 8^th!

At the end of the qualifying round there was an alliance selection process where the top 8 teams can pick two other teams to join them. We were in a position to either pick two other teams to join us for an alliance or be picked by a higher ranking team and join their alliance. During the alliance selection the fourth ranked team picked us and we joined them. Together we selected another team that complimented us and the alliance got the robots and teams ready for competition for the afternoon of best-of-3 elimination matches.

During the quarter final rounds we went up against a fairly strong alliance, but because of our strategy and well functioning robots we were able to defeat them in two matches and moved onto the semifinal rounds.

In the semifinal rounds we went up against the first seeded alliance consisting of three extremely tough teams. Our only strategy was to brute-force outscore their alliance. They had two robots that could rack up a lot of points, but they had some weaknesses. The first match we won with an 88 to 62 victory. The second match we tied at 70-70. There was some confusion leading to the announcement of the score and we were all on the edge of our seats. Between the second and third match the opponent called a time-out to fix something that broke on one of their robots. They were not able to completely repair one of the robots, so it was no longer able to score very effectively. During the third match the opponent alliance (#1 seed at the competition) decided to double-team defend *our* robot to keep it from scoring. We still managed to rack up a pile of points and won with a score of 72 to 48. This moved us on to the final rounds.

The first match of the final rounds we won by a close victory of 66 to 60. During the second match one of our alliance partners had a breakdown of their drive train which meant we were playing 2-on-3. We lost this round with a score of 44 to 80. Between the second and third match we called a time-out to hopefully give our alliance partner time to make repairs. The repairs took longer than the timeout period, so a backup team was brought in to replace them. During this last match our other alliance partner had a breakdown and again we were playing 2-on-3. We lost this last with a score of 36 to 64 and ended up taking second place.

During the awards ceremony that followed, awards were given out for various accomplishments. In previous years we won the Sportsmanship Award because of the support we provided to other teams during the competition. This year we took it a huge step forward and won the Engineering Inspiration Award. This award is given to a team that advances respect and appreciation for engineering within the team’s school and community. This is the second highest award that FIRST gives out. We won this award because of the work done by the team at various community events including Oktoberfest and Walleye weekend, hosting various robotics camps for grade school students during the summer, and the many links between Team #93, the Tesla charter school, Plexus, and other supporting engineering companies in the community.

N.E.W. Apple Corps Robotics, Team #93 continues to be a very well respected and competitive team among our peers. We’re already looking forward to the next regional competition the weekend of March 28^th in Minneapolis!