Although we did not perform well during the MOA Signature Event, we learned a lot from the top teams there. After MOA, I worked really hard to combine all of the best designs from different top teams in MOA into our Third Generation Robot.
After finishing the CAD, the robot was built pretty quickly. We were able to finish the robot in early September, giving us a whole month to practice driving and code the autonomous routes.
In both September and October, our robotics lab held scrimmages to help us familiarize ourselves with playing tournament matches. Not only did we win both scrimmages, but we also improved our strategy, communication, and driving skills through the matches.
I also spent quite a lot of time tuning the autonomous program and practicing driver skills to improve our skills score (which was 38 points in MOA).
Going to the competition, we felt much more confident and prepared compared to MOA.
Since we could stack quite efficiently, we were pretty good at tournament matches. We won all but one qualification match and ranked 4th on the qualification ranking.
Luckily, our sister team 66799T was ranked 1st and they selected us as their alliance partner. So, we went into the elimination rounds as the first seed.
In the Semifinals, we faced our sister team 66994D. I made the wrong decision of going to steal opponents' toggles instead of protecting ours, letting opponents steal our toggle. We would've lost if the opponents weren't disqualified for lifting our teammate.
We were able to win Final 1 with a really big margin after stealing opponents' toggle.
In Final 2, the opponents switched to a more conservative strategy. In the last 5 seconds, our opponents activated their toggle extension mechanism and touched our toggle, making it worth 0 points and costing us the match.
Final 3 was the closest match. In the beginning of the match, I accidentally hit a neutral goal, knocking off 2 pins. This time, I successfully defended our home toggle, but we left all other toggles undefended. Although we still won by 15 points, we were disqualified due to the earlier neutral goal descoring.
In the skills judging, we aimed for 128 points in driver skills and 108 in auto skills. I ran slowly in the first driver attempt and got 118 points, a solid start. Then we failed the first auto attempt because I ran the test route instead of the full one. The second and third auto attempts both failed because we weren't able to flip the second toggle. Still, we got 50 points in auto, much better than the 10 points we got in MOA.
Speaking of judging, we did pretty well since we had a pretty complete notebook and a well-organized team interview. Luckily, our work was recognized by the judges, winning us the Design Award.
We were really close to winning the tournament, so we were all quite depressed after the finals. But the tournament that can actually win us a worlds spot is the PAS-VEX Signature Event in December. So we have no time to feel discouraged, and we must quickly build our next generation robot to overcome the challenges we have observed throughout this competition.
Overall, it was a fun and rewarding experience. The hard work after MOA really did pay off. Along with the experience gained during this tournament, we shall do even better in upcoming competitions.
