We're number 8

Well I guess I should let you know how the competition went.

The last milestone was basically the same as the competition, meaning we had to navigate to the correct Fay, capture her and locate and climb the correct side of the building.

We had some problems the first time we did this milestone, meaning it was horrible. I think we got 50 out of 120. We found broken connections and bad solder joints. These with a dead battery made for a bad time.

Well, we got a redo, and after fixing the problems, and some more testing, we redid the milestone.

This time it went much better. 110 out of 120. An improvement you could say.

So we looked like it was going to go pretty well on design day.

Yesterday was design day.

Before the competition started, our robot was running ok. Ben was doing last minute tweaks, and I was cautiously hopeful. We were in the fifth heat, so we had time to verify sensors and such.

The heats were going as expected. Meaning we had spent weeks watching some robot do really well and some not so well. I guess you could say there were few surprises.

In our heat we started ok. Our robot was running well and it was avoiding other robots. We made it to the doll, captured her and then made it to our side of the building. At this time our robot was supposed to turn around and back up to the building. Well it did a 360 and backed away from the building. Well since there was time, we started over. This was allowed when a robot got stuck, so we started over, capture Fay Wray again, and off to the building. It turned around properly this time and backed up to the building. Now our climbing device was a threaded rod and a window anchor. We've had problem with it lining up, but this time it did back up and the anchor hit a window. Not the center window but a window, then it started to climb, for about 5 secs. Then the nut bound up and it stopped. The TA tried to help it, but then time ran out.

There was a chance for a redo, but looking when they posted the score, we got 100 of 120. The top score of our heat.

That it turns out was our ticket to the second round.

We moved on even though there were several teams that did better when they redid the first round.

The second round we had a bit more of a problem. Our robot was running rock solid. It could tell which direction it was going so it knew it if was not lined up to capture Fay( our capture claw is on the right side). When it approach Fay for the wrong direction, it turned around and tried to capture her. It would avoid other robots. And I bet if it got to the building it would have climbed. The problem was that we were on the course with other robots. Our robot got caught more times with other robots, It seamed because the other robots that made it to the second round didn’t have avoidance built in. One robot was a pain in our behind because it just stopped and waited for the other robot to get out of the way. Our avoidance was for our robot to do a 180 and run away. This doesn’t work well when there is a robot on both sides of you. And those robots just stop and sit there and wait for you to get out of the way. We got two chances in the second round to do well but each time we ended up getting caught between two robots and couldn’t get away. This was a pain, We did capture Fay, but could never get past the other robots to get to the building. After the final round, we did get a third chance to get a better score, with our best on the second round was 70 out of 120. I was frustrating.

So Ben did an incredible job with our code. One of the TA’s was saying that our code was doing everything it should do. He really liked it. We just ran into problems that we couldn’t foresee, like robots that just sit there and do nothing.

So we made it to the second round. This meant that we were in the top ten least.

Dr Minor listed the final standings today, and we were 8^th. 8^th out of 30 odd teams.

Not a bad job.

There will be a youtube video of the competitions at some time. I will let people know when it is up.

On a side note. Desert News has a picture of the course, and you can see Aidan sitting just off the side. Look in the education section and find article on the U’s design day.

You can’t miss him, well I couldn’t.

Sorry this was so long. And believe it or not I left a lot out.

Laters