Today was the first qualifying competition. We started out doing really well, being in 8th place out of 26, but eventually fell behind to 21st.
While the competition didn’t go quite the way we planned, we still learned a lot.
The first big thing we noticed was practice. Since we generally work on the robot right up to competition, we often don’t get in much practice, and this year was similar. As we went and practiced driving more during our downtime, we figured out how to reliably gain points in different ways, such as hanging hooks on a bar. This lead the drivers to suggest adding driving practice on Tuesdays, which we will consider.
The second problem we ran into was the reliability of our claw. Our claw had issues transferring “samples,” which are small plastic bricks, into our vertical “bucket” to raise them to an elevated basket. We have some ideas, such as a chute mounted near our bucket. We also took pictures of other teams’ robots so we can look at what they did well and use their designs as inspiration.
We plan to go over what went wrong during the following practice and figure out what improvements can be made.
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