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Pennsylvania State FVC Regional February 2007 Team Overdrive took a trip to Weatherly, PA where we revealed our newly designed robot - Max II. She is a sequel to Max I and could be mistaken for him, but they are different. Max II can fit 10 balls in her bucket and is quicker than Max I in gathering the balls. The down side of being quicker, is not being able to get onto the platform and hang, even though our newly designed hook is capable. This better robot and the fact that we had improved our scouting and coaching/strategy made us ready to face the competition in our 3rd regional. .jpg) Going into the competition, we wanted to test Max II. We liked the way Max II was looking and thought we had a chance at winning yet another regional. We had learned a lot from our mistakes in Delaware, and were pretty much prepared for whatever could come our way. When we arrived, we checked in and set up our pit area. The opening Ceremonies were lively and exciting with the national anthems of the USA and Canada sung and announcements made. Then the teams all piled back into the pit area to get their robots ready for the competition. The Practice Rounds were full of broken down robots and frustrated students as their hopes were put on hold until their robots worked. Max II reminded us of past problems when we tried our high goal scoring autonomous mode. The bucket got stuck on the goal, did not hit the sensors, and timed-out. We sat there, frustrated through the round, unable to do anything. .jpg) Qualifying Rounds for Team Overdrive started out shaky, as we got another scare when the tether connection was loose and our robot went nowhere. We had our bucket full, but were unable to dump all the balls due to the loss of communication from the controller to the receiver. We lost by a close 24 < 25. In the stands, our scouters had to catch-up since the match list was being held back due to 2 of the teams being missing. When we got the list that we so depended on, it was almost time to start the rounds. This sent us into a controlled panic to get our scouts the correct papers, but we pulled through enough to get us ahead of the games. Things went pretty smoothly then for a while. Meanwhile, on the field, we decided to not use the high goal scoring autonomous because of its inconsistency. All our matches after that, we went for the atlas ball, but our alliance partners rarely scored a thing. This meant we usually lost autonomous, making it harder to win being down by 10 points to start. This proved costly in our second match, where we scored well (15 balls to be exact) but ended up losing the match 45 < 76. We were 0-2, and we realized that we were probably not going to be in the top 8 and get to pick our alliance partners. Instead, we needed to concentrate on scoring lots in our next matches and marketing our team and robot. We made little hand-outs telling about our robot's abilities and our valuable scouting material that we were collecting that other teams could benefit from. Our next match was a success, as we pulled ahead of the other alliance 78 > 19! We were thrilled with Max II's performance and concentrated even more on telling others about our robot. Meanwhile, back in the stands, we were compiling our data onto a computer and finishing our scouting of the matches. We had decided, just for fun, to scout ourselves, and found we placed 6th after our matches. We won our next match 48 > 0, but only made it to about 19th place. We had talked to a few teams that we wanted to be chosen by (according to our scouting material) and one team, 3041, wanted to choose us! It was all exciting, but scary, because we had never been in this postition before. .jpg) Alliance picking was nerve-wracking as we saw the other teams take their places around the fields and get ready to choose their alliance partners. We weren't in the top 8, as we expected, but we were pretty confident that someone would pick us. The first team, 3214-Delbarton, was one of the ones we had liked from the practice rounds, and they chose team 3053-Occam's Engineers, arguably the best scorer in the competiton. They were the top team on our list from scouting -- scoring 158 points in just 3 matches! The next team was 3041-Emmaus, who had talked to us before. However, they asked the second best scorer according to our list, team 3549-Vexy Things. Vexy Things didn't have much practice in alliance picking and had just entered the 8th place spot, where they had the chance to choose their own alliance. They declined and Emmaus went to their second pick -- team 3179-Team Overdrive! We accepted and thanked them for picking us. As the picking went on, we were undecided about who to pick for our 3rd alliance partner. We talked back and forth, compared notes, tried to remember details, and finally got it settled. Meanwhile, team 3325 had chosen team 3155, team 3628 had chosen team 2158, team 3208 had chosen team 2055, team 3549-Vexy Things had chosen team 3652, team 3413 had chosen team 3361, and finally team 3491 had chosen team 3669. Interestingly enough, team 3491 hadn't scored anything for 3 matches during qualifying rounds, yet they won them all, riding on their randomly picked alliance partner's backs. One of them was us, and our scouting methods prevented teams like that from getting high placement. Then it was back to the first place alliance, who picked team 3619 for their third partner. We went back to our old friends from NJ, team 2073-Driven Bolts who went crazy upon hearing their number. After "thank yous" were shared and the other alliances picked their partners, we gathered together to discuss strategy and who would go first. It was decided and we got ready for our matches against the 7th place alliance teams 3413, 3361, & 3486. .jpg) The Playoffs were a mess of rushing around, strategy talks, and robot break-downs for alliance 2. We were up against the 7th alliance in our first match. Emmaus and Team Overdrive started off with a win of 64 > 46. But, during that match, our robot got "injured" when our motor got stripped that controlled our front omni wheel, and we had to put it back on in a rush to be ready by the next match. Emmaus' robot was having problems, too, as the front arm was not working, and if we didn't play in the next match, they would have to. We had a time-out, if we needed it, but we repaired Max II in Nascar pit-stop time. Our next game was with Driven and we clinched a semi-final spot with a 46 > 14 win, but Driven's gears had been malfunctioning and didn't look too good. Then it was on to the semi's where we faced the team that had a really good robot, but not very good strategy. We had a good strategy that we thought would work and discussed it thoroughly with our alliance partners just before the game. We knew what we had to do in order to win against this team that was very good... Vexy Things. As we set up our robots for autonomous mode, we were nervous, but confident about our strategies. As soon as driver control was on, Driven went to score a bunch of balls in the high goal while we went to do a little shoving with Vexy Things. They were able to get a bunch of balls in their high goal, but that's as far as we let them go. They were blocked by us, and we didn't budge until the final seconds of the game, when they decided to go around the long way to get to their side of the field and we got caught on some tape. Yes, the tape was something we had struggled with in the past, and this time it proved costly, as we couldn't get to the atlas ball in time. We lost 44 < 70, but we knew we could have a chance at winning - we had kept Vexy Things from scoring a ball! This achievement gave us a big boost as we prepared for the next match. It was do or die and finally Driven's gears gave way. In autonomous their gearing was totally stripped and we lost auto-mode. Emmaus was now the only one on our side who could score, but their scooper arm wasn't working. We tried to get some points, and tried to play defense, but it was no use. With 2 non-scoring robots, it's hard to win. 3< 58 was the final score of that match and we were disappointed with it, but when they don't work, they just don't work. Vexy Things went on to beat the 1st place alliance 2 matches out of 3, and that put us in 3rd place over the 4th alliance (who had Driven Nuts on their alliance). .jpg)  When all was said and done, we were happy with the way Max II was scoring, but we knew we needed to improve on getting on the platform and hanging with our ingenious new hook. |
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