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Hello, Robolions team members, mentors, friends, and community members! Welcome to "The Fourth Law of Robotics," home to University City High School's FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Team. We hope to use this blog to inform you about what we're up to.
We compete in the FRC (First Robotics Competition), an annual competition where we have six weeks to build a robot from scratch. This year's game is Recycle Rush. We'll post updates here to let you all know what we're up to with building (and competing with) our robot!
We also are now competing in FTC (First Tech Challenge), the next level down from FRC. The game was called Ring It Up!

Friday, March 18, 2011

Day two of the STL Regional Competition

Our first day of actual competition is through! It was quite an exciting day for the team. We worked through a lot of problems and struggled through matches, and rejoiced in victory. Some major highlights of the day were:

  • Dean Kamen (the incredible founder of FIRST) made an appearance!! We all got our shirts signed and even got our robot bumpers signed. We got to talk to him a little bit and he made a speech at the closing ceremony.
(Dean is the dude in the denim shirt. He's a major celebrity in the engineering world!)

  • We got our minibot up and working! There were some discrepancies at first as to whether it was allowed to stay on the entire time it was on the field, but we worked that out with the refs.
  • We were partnered with some great alliances, and up against worthy opponents as well! It all worked out. We met a lot of great new people again, as we expect we will meet tomorrow!
Our ranking fluctuated a lot- at one point, we were in 3rd place, but by the end of the day we settled into 15th. That puts us in the running for the elimination rounds tomorrow afternoon, but we still have a few qualifiers tomorrow morning, so we can potentially move up in the rankings.

There were no major problems with Quorra today. There are some issues with the autonomous programming, but Daniel has been hard at work fixing that, and we all believe in him! We've got to give kudos to Sammiyah and the other people who worked on the minibot- without your tireless work, we would not have had a funcitioning minibot.


Here's a picture of the playing field:

It was an exciting day, and we have yet another one to go. Tomorrow is our last day of the STL Regional, and in the morning, we have more qualifiers. In the afternoon, the elimination rounds begin, when teams choose alliances and then compete, eliminating losing alliances until only one is left, and that team will go on to the International Competition, which will be held in Saint Louis in April. More info on that later.

See you at the competition!! :)

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting! Wish this would have been going on when my kids were in school. Keep us posted and good luck today.
    Caryn St.Clair

    ReplyDelete