Today was a decent work day. We continued to work on the drawings of the robot in its current state. We also tested the autonomous which worked and also did some TeleOp testing to give the drivers practice and to address any problems with the hardware. Other than that, we worked on the notebook and just basically kept up our usual operations. We are also getting ready for the robotics FTC LA qualifier we are hosting on Saturday. We are all staying after school until late tomorrow to help with the setup too.
Make videos that display the different features of our team
Make lots of drawings of the current robot
Add a page to the notbook called robot design
Assist the Kings and Queens becaus they have no computer
Reflections
The reason for the big gap between meetings is the fact that we did not meet during finals week so everyone could study and we didn’t meet the week after because we had the majority of that week off due to Martin Luther King day and furlough days.
We spent the first part of our meeting doing a considerable amount of planning for the San Diego championships. Our main goals are to maintain the robot in its current state because we want to work on perfecting everything else, adding to the engineering book all of the drawings that we have done but never put in the notebook, perfecting the IR autonomous so it works every time, getting in as much driving practice as possible so we don’t have to waste time getting centered, etc. during the matches, improving our poster board and designing as well as implementing the projected display we plan to have that will be touch sensitive on whatever surface it projects on, and do our best to maintain the level of work habit and focus we have had throughout the year.
Evan added an additional two rollers to each side of the robot in the treads between the middle roller and the two outside rollers. We did this in order to spread out the weight of the robot more so turning is faster and more efficient.
Hunter has been working on making videos and pictures that we will put in our projected display including nice pictures of each member individually. We plan to organize the display on Thursday.
The Kings and Queens for some reason do not have a computer to program or run their robot so we have lent them one of our old computers to use for the rest of the year on the grounds that they return it, and also because we will always jump at chances to be gracious and professional.
Erik, Dante, and Chris have been working on making final drawings of the latest elements of the robot including the gears of the scissor lift, the scissor lift itself, the treads, the forklift, the hand, and the mechanism to move the hand up and down. We are also planning to put all of these drawings together along with a compilation of all of the drawings from previous elements of the robot to show the evolution of all of the major parts of the robot.
We passed all of our inspections with much ease. Our interview went very well too although Evan, Hunter, and Fletcher were still at inspection for the first half of the interview and they came for the second half. Everyone talked a good amount and the judges seemed very impressed.
Then came our first match. The autonomous was about to work but team 4625 pushed us out of the way with their blocking autonomous. Then, once TeleOp started, we lost connection almost immediately and we periodically throughout the match regained connection for a few seconds and lost the connection directly after. We lost this match 60 – 0
In the second match, our autonomous also nearly worked but it was off a little due to the ledge of the center goal area. We lost connection a little during the TeleOp but for the most part we were fine, although at the end of the match our mechanism for moving the hand up and down that’s mounted on the scissor lift didn’t lift up all the way so it made us not be able to pick up rings at the end. We won this match 80 – 30 and we were able to place two rings on the top row. Lunch break, and repairs for the robot. Since we lost connection again we knew it was our problem with the wires. We thought the problem might be that the Samantha was malfunctioning due to a wire problem that made the power to it waver frequently, so we investigated how we might fix that.
The Third Match: This was the most amazing robotics match we have ever participated in in all of robotics. Our autonomous placed the ring on the IR column on the bottom row, in TeleOp, we did this:
Come the End Game, we lifted our alliance partner’s robot (which had not been built for more than 5 hours) 17″, getting us the LA area’s highest lift and Getting us a final score of 235, an LA area high.
In the fourth match, we were devastated. Our robot didn’t work at all save one motor. We had one motor serial that had the motor for our fork lift on it, and it worked, though we couldn’t use it because the forklift was against the wall. We are yet to diagnose what went wrong.
In the fifth and final match, we did no better; we had the same problem.
We did our best, there’s only so much we can do, but we did score the highest score in LA which is pretty amazing.
We we ended up in 12th place and did not get chosen for a final alliance (though we were second choice for several teams), which is less than what we had hoped for.
When it came to awards time, they were setting the tournament computer up for the Promote award presentation and played the first couple of seconds, which happened to be the same first couple seconds as our Promote video. Fletcher proceeded to have a freak-out, as he was quite excited, and got told to calm down since we hadn’t gotten the award yet. After the Awards ceremonie got started, they played our Promote Video and announced us as the winners of the Promote Award. The rest of the awards got announced and we were finalists for each of these:
Rockwell Collins Innovate Award
Connect Award
PTC Design Award
Motivate Award
This happens to be every judged award besides the Think award. At the end the ceremonie, they announced the Inspire Award. Third Place went to Simi Valley Robotics, second to Monrovia’s own Kings and Queens Team 4625, and first place Inspire Award went to us, the Suit Bots Team 4628!
Today, January 12, 2013, we the Suitbots have received the Inspire Award at the Antelope Valley FTC Qualifier. This is an amazing achievement for us as a team. Our goal this year was to do our best to be the team to inspire all of the others, and we have succeeded. We hope that receiving this award will inspire other teams to follow in our footsteps and be an inspiring team. Just to be labeled as a model of an ideal team that other teams can look up to is the best reward of all. We will use this amazing experience and honor to drive us to continue to do our best at all of the future competitions and hopefully make it to St. Louis by doing well at the LA FTC Championships in March.
