twoplustwoequalsblog

Remember how I told you you should have come to the UTC FIRST Robotics Regional? I was right. A few of you did though; much thanks to those select individuals.

Basically, here is how it all went down:

On Thursday, we practiced various things and made improvements to a few devices. We weren’t doing great, but we weren’t doing horrible. Mostly we were just practicing shooting. For reference, here is a photo of our robot. We didn’t play any defense because we didn’t want to make enemies and because we didn’t really need to practice that.

On Friday, we played in the qualification matches. We went 6-1-1 for the day, which isn’t that bad. There were a number of bots that could score a crazy amount of balls if you let them alone, but we played defence a bit more. We also played offense, and were able to score 7-10 balls high per match when we tried. At the end of the day, we went back to the school and spent two hours talking about alliance selection. This year’s game is 3v3, so for the elimination matches, the top 8 teams each get to pick two other teams to play with them. We were ranked 5th, so it was likely we would pick.

Today, we lost our last two qualification matches, moving us to 8th rank. A hastily updated alliance selection list was given to Kim, who got to pick 5th (some of the higher top 8 teams picked each other). Our first pick was a team from Suffield, Aces High. When it came back around to us, many of the other bots we were looking at were gone, and Kim’s list had run up. In a stroke of brilliance, she invited the Uberbots, from Avon. Our alliance set, we went to eat lunch and strategize.

The top few teams had two amazing shooter bots each. We had three decent shooter bots. Here is where our alliance selection strategy shined. Aces High was able to score 10 low balls every time in auto (ten seconds of programmed functions start each match). The Uberbots scored about 0-3 high in auto. We knocked the other teams shooting bots in auto. Somehow, we managed to beat the amazing shooter bots in auto, landing us a ten point bonus and a hefty lead.

The quarterfinals we won by a large margin. The semifinals, however, were scary. We were against the first seeded alliance, who had amazingly strong shooters (20 and 126, for those of you keeping score). In the first match, we lost by two points. Down a match, and the clear underdogs, we shifted strategies. Instead of scoring, our team would only play defense, keeping the entire other alliance from scoring high. It worked, and we won by a large margin. We did it again in the last match, upsetting the number one alliance from being down a game.

The other semifinal had been an upset as well. We outmanuevered the other finalist alliance on the field, and won the UTC regional! Words do not describe how estatic our alliance was after we won. Everyone was jumping up and down. I have never been in such a dense area of excitement before. It was absolutely amazing. Everyone on our three teams (who happened to be adjacent in the stands) came pouring onto the field and we were all going nuts. My legs were killing me from standing for three hours, and I was completely parched from yelling and being under the lights, but it was so sweet.

I got Woodie Flowers to sign my shirt in between the finals matches, and Andy Grady gave me and Kim (and forthcoming for Melough and Pelan) NERD shirts. We didn’t win any engineering awards (poor Jake, but there’s still Philly), but we still got some sweet trophies and medals.

Now, can we find the money to go to Nationals?