Competition 2012
Day 1 of the Greater Kansas City Regional First Robotics competition – Thursday March 1, 2012
Practice Day
First Team 1723 the FBI had a standard start to any robotics competition on the first day as we got lost driving to the arena, “Hook’s fault,” the team grew with anticipation to get things started for the day. A mob of robot hooligans were gathered outside of Hale arena in the West bottoms of Kansas City waiting for the doors to open. After the doors opened and everyone rushed inside we began the process of setting up our pit area. This is the space we are provided to make repairs and changes to our robot, with the pit set up we unpacked our robot and started the drawn out process of getting the list of things done that we had made had to happen before participating in practice rounds.
Our robot had a small amount of wiring to be done, the decals and plastic coverings had to be installed and we had to make mechanical adjustments to our robot just to make an attempt to go through the inspection process. Inspection is a magical time when an official makes sure your robot meets all of the constraints and criteria of the competition rules and that all of your mechanisms are safe to operate. We went through inspection having only minor problems to be adjusted before getting our robot inspected again so we could actually compete.
Following Inspection we took our robot to the competition field to run our first practice match. I had a great amount of anxiety because the first time you hook up to the field with your controller it never does what it is supposed to, aaaand our robot, “Plan B,” didn’t disappoint and connection was lost. The way I always figure is that at least it happened in a practice match. In our next match Plan B has communication with the field and our driver Candyta Wilford is able to move the robot around the field while her shooter co-driver Quinten Vowells aims the turret and takes a shot toward the hoop. The ball missed and our attempt to push the competition bridge down failed, but at least we have a starting point of where to make further adjustments with our robot in preparation for seeding matches that start tomorrow.
Designing and building a robot is a learning process and sometimes it is a painful one, but in the grand scheme of things everyone learns many different skills and new ways to think about problems and potential problems. Our experiences don’t define us as a team, but how we respond to those experiences show us the true worth that what we are doing has a positive impact on our lives and will help us to become more productive and dependable citizens.
Thank you for taking an interest in our team and we hope that we are able to bring you more and more exciting information about how our team is doing tomorrow in Day 2 of the KC Regional competition. Tomorrow seeding matches will start and those matches determine our team ranking and if we will be in contention to make the finals on Saturday afternoon. Thank you and wish us luck.
From the Perspective of Coach Hook
GO FBI!
Day 2 of the Greater Kansas City Regional First Robotics competition – Friday March 2, 2012