Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

Does anyone have or found pictures of the better bots of competition such as 121, 126, or 350. As well as the Finalists, 175, 138, 58 and any other standouts?

Congrats to everyone that went to competition. You survived!

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

This is my First year in the program i loved every min of it. I do aggre with there being too meny yellow men in the Verizon center (i took a nap and the man is yellow woke me up how rude) but i liked how everything was set up and the safety in the place was unbeliveable i never thought that all thouse people in the pits could all have on safety glasses on at all times. just waiting for next year its gona be great

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

Someone was smoking in the bathroom which set off the fire alarm. I felt so bad for team 501 because this is the most prestigious award you can win, and they were interupted in the middle of it. When we all came back in the building, hardly anyone was left to see them get their Chairmans Award. Congrats team 501 on winning the Chairmans Award.

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

:D I agree with what was said earlier. The bass at the event was DEFINITELY WAY TOO LOUD. It was piercing my head and chest. They had two subwoofers that where each the size of my car. I also agree that there was too much security personnel. I was interrogated when I tried to walk over to a vending machine next to the machine shop. The Verizon Center security staff had little knowledge of the event and didn't realize that some people had to access certain areas of the arena. This was also true during eliminations, when there were little seats available on the playing field side of the curtain. Some people, who had no choice but to stand in the stairwells and entry doors, were harassed by Verizon security staff.

I also agree that the referrees definitely held their flags when it came to "intentional" ramming. Our robot was rammed repeatedly above very high on our robot when our scissor lift was up. This is clearly against the rules as teams are only allowed to hit "low" on robots. In one match, an unnamed team even place their arm between the scissors in our lift and prevented us from moving our lift. We repeatedly, yet politely, pointed this out to the referees over the course of the two days of competition. Unfortunately, no action was taken by the referees in any of the matches in question. I understand that the referees have a busy job and there is a lot that they have to watch, but a line does have to be drawn when it comes to ramming and striking other robots. The referees can't on one hand be quick when it comes to interference penalties and on the other hand turn a blind eye to robots intentionally hitting other robots high. This is especially true when the robots being attacked aren't even carrying tetras.

I was also wondering why teams weren't allowed to have their robots in the team photo, especially when we did last year. However, our team faculty advisor became extremely angry when he heard this and completely ignored the staff at the event. He forced his way through angry BAE volunteers to bring the robot to the photographers. You'll notice that on the BAE website our team is the only one with their robot in the picture.

On a lighter note, it was very funny when the fire alarm went off at the moment when Dean Kamen was announcing team 501 as the winner of the chairman's award. All of a sudden power to the video screen, lights, and microphone goes off and a siren starts going off. The building had to be evacuated. Dean seemed extremely annoyed when this happened. There were other issues as well, such as the leader board being inoperative throughout the first day, no one having success with the camera, and other minor problems.

Other than that, the BAE regional went along perfectly fine and without any problems. ;)

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

It might have been us (529, rectangular green box with an unused arm on top) Doing all the intentional ramming you're talking about. This is simply because Our engineers were lazy and didn't figure out how to make the arm retract (still haven't, actually), So we were forced to play defense. According to our driver, the 4 penalties we go that match was from us being bumped by another robot (into the robot in the loading zone), but I think it's just because he's never used a 1 joystick drive before, and slipped.

I agree that people were hitting each other way too hard though, because everything not entirely inside the lexan "armor" (including the armor itself) was beat to crap, and has to be replaced.

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As the winner of the safety award, I was rather disappointed with the standard trophy. I had been hoping for a giant bubble suit.

--Petey

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

Wow.

Last time I checked, a big part of being a team is having all the team members take responsibility for the entire team. If a team member isn't pulling their weight, for whatever reason, then it is the responisibility of the entire team to pick up the slack and continue on. Successful teams - in almost any aspect of life (i.e. not just robotics) - don't make excuses and assign blame when something goes wrong. They improvise. They adapt. They overcome. They correct the problem and move on.

If something on your robot isn't working, then why don't you take the responsibility to fix it? Isn't that better than displaying such an amazing lack of respect for the engineers that support your team? Isn't that what being a TEAM is all about?

-dave

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I want to thank everyone at the BAE regional for a great weekend. Also, congratulations to the first place teams and team 501 for their successes. Good luck to all still to compete, I hope to see you next year.

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First off i would like to thank teams 121 and 126 for giving us the oppuritunity to be part of thier alliance. You guys are awesome and i can't wait to get the chance to work with teams like you again.

anyway, all the pics that BAE systems took are avaliable at
http://www.baesystemsfirst.org/regional/gallery.htm

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we're trying.

I wasn't intending to disrespect my teams engineers, it's just the way I talk. Something more appropriate, but meaning the same thing I meant would be along the lines of "We still haven't figured out how to retract our arm without having the cables foul, because of the fact that the extend and retract motors run at diferent speeds, The motor we use to extend (Van door) is limited to 1 per robot (as I understand it), and the motor we are trying to use to retract the arm doesn't have enough power to extend it. We're at the point of trying anything to make it work, Including the random suggestion of a system of pulleys and the retracting mechanism of a tape mesure to keep the cables taut while retracting."

I just wanted to explain why we were forced to play defense instead of offence, even though we have an arm that can cap a goal just fine. If we used the arm though, we stood a good chance of over balancing because we had no way to retract the 11 foot arm.

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

Whoever asked for the 121 pictures - one of the URI Mentors has a website with tons of pics from all throughout the build season check it out: http://www.joemenassa.com/Robotics05.html

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God team 1027... I must say I was like praying to be in an alliance with you in the eliminations... I absolutely loved your robot... Great job...

As for the Regional... I wasn't really impressed to be honest... People said the music was way too loud but I thought it was perfect...

It took the life out of us when the security kept telling us to not make so much noise with our drums and horns so we were really really toned down...

We kept getting yelled at for standing in the aisles because our seats were like taken over and so we had half the student body of the team wondering around...

The food prices there were outrageous so we had to walk around the city to get food...

After half the team didn't have seats we would sit in the center where you are allowed if your team is up but once the match was over and before the score was up we were getting yelled at to move though some teams had members sitting there when their team wasn't even up or in the elimination matches...

The Refs to us were very inconsistant about calls and penalties and such but I don't want to turn this into anything bad... They do have a very tough job...

Of course we still had fun this competition... Some of the robots were amazing... Thank you to everyone who made it possible and see you at Chesapeak and Nationals!!!

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First off, congratulations to the BAE finalists, champions, and award winners. This was my first time at the Manchester Regional and I really enjoyed it. We had a very successful run and wound up ranked 16/51, I think, but unfortunately didn't get into the playoffs. Anyways, here's some things I saw at this regional that might be helpful to teams at upcoming regionals:

-Penalties play a huge role in scoring. Early in the regional, teams were getting penalized for not visibly touching the loading triangles, but after a mad rush for "brightly colored zip ties," these penalty flags stopped flying as much. Human players also got better at keeping both feet in the triangles. One killer penalty that became important as more teams played aggresive defense was interfering with a robot at a loading zone...a 30 point penalty that can easily swing a match one way or another.

-Defense is huge. Alliances learned to dedicate one robot entirely to defense as the competition progressed. Defense is more aggressive this year too than I've seen. Many teams push the limit between "shoving" and "ramming" and of course several robots got flipped. Many of the playoff rounds had lower total scores than the qualifying rounds. Several low, fast, high-traction robots with only mediocre or semi-functional arms made it to the playoffs on the strength of their deadly defense (501 is the best example I can think of.)

-Stacking height was not as important as strategic positioning. Making rows seemed to be the priority, and as a result Tetras wound up spread pretty evenly over the goals. Most goals had only one or two Tetras and there was rarely more than 4 or 5 on any given goal.

-More alliances than I thought took advantage of 10-point parking. There is actually plenty of room for 3 robots in the end zone if they are in the right spots.

-If you can cap a vision tetra in autonomous, you will have the respect of everyone and are basically guaranteed a spot in the playoffs because not one team did it in all three days at BAE as far as I know. The most common autonomous was whacking the side tetras down, which despite being only one point at first often saved some effort in completing a row or two. Some teams capped non-vision tetras in autonomous as well.

Hope some of this is helpful. I can't wait to see some more regional action! Good luck everyone.

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

Pictures from the regional are at http://www.baesystemsfirst.org/regional/gallery.htmClick on "Teams" at the top for the team photos.

Oh, and add me to people who thought the music was WAY too loud. Of the 8 FIRST competitions I've been to, this was the first time I have needed earplugs in the pits because of the field music (and we were on the far side of the pits).

Re: BAE FINAL REMARKS
 

Did anyone else notice that the fire alarm went off at 5:01?