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April 15 FIRST Championship in AtlantaOh, what fun it was!
As I mentioned the other day, the FIRST Robotics Championship Competition was this weekend in Atlanta, GA (USA). About 350 teams gathered from (alphabetically) Brazil, Canada, Israel, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States to show how well they could build a robot that could pick up inner tubes and hang them on a tree. And yes, there were about 350 different ways to do this.
My school's team (Team 811) made a good showing of it. Our robot's specialties this year were its autonomous abilities and overall robustness. As previously described, during the first 15 seconds of the 2:15 match, the robots are on their own, without human control, and a scoring benefit goes to the team whose robot can hang a tube all by itself. We did this several times. To let you know just what this means, consider this: The teams competing in Atlanta were divided into four divisions (Archimedes, Curie, Galileo and Newton). We were in Newton along with 85 other teams, and there were 102 preliminary matches between Friday and Saturday morning. In the 75 matches on Friday, each with 6 teams on the field, I'd say that tubes were hung autonomously less than 20 times; we did it twice.
I say Sparky (our robot) was robust because our pit crew found they had a LOT of time on their hands. So very few things went wrong, and when they did they were generally minor. This compares to some years when transmissions had to be disassembled, or telescoping arms had to be restrung, or drive trains had to be retentioned, seemingly between every round. This speaks volumes for how far the team has come.
Anyway, on Friday we were in five matches, and we won the first three handily and barely lost the next two. (How do I define "barely"? Where a lot of matches had 20 or less points apiece, the fourth match we lost by a score of 118-132!) On Saturday, we split our two matches, finishing up with a 4-3 record and in 26th place. The good news is one of the top 8 seeded teams liked what they saw in us, and invited us to be one of their alliance partners for the Quarter Finals. The unfortunate news is that we lost in the best of three match playoffs, and were done.
I am full of pride with how well the team performed, both during Build Season when we constructed Sparky, and in competition. Well done, Team 811!
April 09 FIRST in AtlantaThis week the FIRST Robotics Championship Competition takes place in Atlanta. My school's team, Bishop Guertin's Team 811, will be competing with and against over 300 other teams from around the US and around the world. Should be a blast.
This year's competition, Rack 'n Roll, involves robots that pick up pool inner tubes and hang them on a large tree-like structure in the middle of the field of play. Six robots (three on the red team, three on the blue team) play in the 2 minute-15 second round, and scores are based on the length of rows of tubes hanging on the tree at the end of the round. But what makes the game REALLY intense is that during the first 15 seconds of the round, the robots run without user control.
Teams that can build a robot that can hang a tube on the rack during this first 15 seconds have a significant competitive advantage, because they start the round with points scored. In previous years, it was quite common for teams to score autonomous points; this year, however, the game's complexity meant that very few teams successfully score this way. Team 811, I am proud to say, is one of the few. In the Manchester, NH Regional competition last month, we had the entire Verizon Arena watching as our robot ("Sparky", named after a few unfortunate incidents during construction) hung it's tube all by itself.
Hopefully, our team will do well in the Newton Division (one of four in the Championships, along with Archimedes, Curie, and Galileo). There will be 81 teams from all across the US, 2 from Canada, and 3 from Israel! Can't wait.
I'll report more as time goes on.
The move has begunWell, there are over five dozen new entries from the latest blog spammer choking theSpoke. (Not that I've read the entries, but I think they're for online drugs.) Depressing, I know, but something tells me that no one will delete these entries (and the account that owns them). Of course, if they did disappear, it would give us long-suffering valid theSpoke users reason to hope that things will get better. Since it is, unfortunately, getting harder and harder to be seen on theSpoke, what with all of the annoying spamBloggers and all, I've started a new blog elsewhere. (If you're interested, you can find me here.) I don't know how long it will take me to fully move there, or how long I'll keep this one active. Some of that will depend on your responses and reaction. Feel free to stop by and chat. April 04 A new home for my blogWith a crack, splash, and the sounds of fizzing broken glass, I hereby christen this blog with the finest bottle of champagne I could find in IE7.
Live Spaces is now the new home of "Intuitively Obvious" (subtitled "Random musings from a former PC Software Engineer now High School Computer Teacher"). Three plus years ago or so I started blogging on another site (theSpoke), where I tried to speak to technology oriented students and teachers about the world as I see it, experiences I've had or were having, all from a point of view that I hoped would be intriguing and refreshingly different. Unfortunately, theSpoke seems to be quietly dying from neglect, so a new home was needed. Hopefully, many of my friends from there will find me here.
The stories you may or may not choose to read here come from an overly active imagination, could be based somewhat on events of the "real" world, and on occasion may involve people you know, heard about, or think you met once. The topics I cover are things that interest me, and include computers and programming, FIRST Robotics, my family and friends, and things that I think others might find occasionally amusing.
So welcome; I hope you'll stop by now and then. |
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