Congratulations to the team for finishing the San Diego regional! We did well: the judges awarded us the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award for our advanced software features, and we got a chance to show off all of the functions that we had originally planned for our robot.
We finally figured out the huge controllability problems that we’d been suffering from the whole competition–a combination of simple issues, such as a disconnected gear shifter motor. After discovering this, we instantly started scoring and driving responsively, and we could lift ourselves reliably! That allowed us to start winning qualification matches.
This was a really tough issue to fix, since we could never reproduce it in the pits or on the practice field. Thinking it was an elusive software bug, we made incredible optimizations to our code, and the software team is confident that we now have one of the fastest-running robot programs.
Now, our results: during our qualification rounds yesterday, we went 2 wins – 5 losses–primarily because of the gearbox issues. Today, we went 2 wins – 1 loss in qualifications. We were selected by the number 7 alliance, with teams 815 and 1332. Right away, we went up in a very tough quarter-final round against the 2nd and 3rd seed teams, and unfortunately lost 2 matches against them, ending the competition for us.
Despite running into some obstacles, our robot was successful at San Diego after fixing that controllability issue. Our systems generally work, and I was incredibly proud of our team, seeing that robot lift up–the crowd screamed!
–David Liu, Co-President
