Thursday, March 21, 2013

FIRST Pittsburgh Regional Robotics Competition

This last weekend was the FRC Pittsburgh regional. There were over 40 high school teams competing in the Frisbee-based competition, so the Peterson Events Center was packed with thousands of teenagers. I was there as captain/driver of City High's team, the Short Circuits (1743)  (as to why our team is named after an electrical failure, I'm at a loss). In short, it was the best robot our school has built and we consistently scored every match.

The competition lasted from Thursday to Saturday. Here is a basic schedule breakdown:

Thursday: Pass inspections and compete in practice matches

Friday: Compete in qualifying matches to develop a rank

Saturday: In the morning finish qualifying matches, in the afternoon are the final alliance selections and subsequent tournament

In fact, we were ranked first or second Friday morning and were in the top 10 90% of the competition. Our robot was one of the few to pick Frisbees off of the ground and most of the competition was just honing in shooting and dealing with small issues as they arose. These issues, like a broken belt or bad autonomous code, are dealt with the in pits:










Each team has a pit on the left side of the curtain and it is where they make adjustments to the robot or talk strategy. After a few devastating loses on Saturday morning, our team finished ranked 16th (the worst all weekend). This excluded us from be one of the alliance captains in the selections at noon and we were, furthermore, not one of the 24 teams to go into the tournament. But, because we were the top ranked team remaining we got to sit with our robot throughout the tournament in case there were any catastrophic failures in the other robots. 


And finally, all the mascots doing the Harlem Shake here.




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