Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

we had several issues last year where our gripper would get entangled with another robot and get smooshed up,destroying our ability to score (luckily we identified this problem early and build many spares)

This year, we sometimes randomly shear a roll pin that controls the shifting in the transmissions, limiting us to low gear (and a snails-pace 5 fps), and we have also had our 'fingers' pulled off of our robot to dangle around and poke things, destroying our ability to hurdle (we think we fixed this in CT- no problems since then (= )

most of our other failures exist in our chaining.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

this year semis at trenton match 2 after losing match 1 our robot didn't turn on because of battery problems and we weren't given a rematch because we received a slight voltage reading.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

Here's one I just remembered...

One match in L.A. 2005, 330 was lined up to play, as were its partners. They had good opponents. Then things went haywire. The other tetra-placer on the alliance was barely outside the size box and wasn't allowed to put their arm the rest of the way down (which they had to power up to do). They were disabled for the entire match. About 15 seconds in, the other partner went to dump a tetra into a lower goal and missed. It landed on their main breaker. It's now a 1-on-3. Ouch.

Another team that year had problems with generating sparks on the field. We're talking showers of them.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

I love it when you have problems that are deemed impossible.
Such as your robot magically developing its own autonomous code. That's a really handy feature.
It is especially great at ramming the robot so hard into the rack that one of the wheels mounts comes off. The really fun part comes when we ask questions from everybody who knew anything about the IFI system and were told that this was impossible. There was no autonomous code yet it moved by itself.
This video explains it better trust me look for team 1477 to go pinball around the course.
http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv...p?matchid=3736

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

973 has had some pretty bad luck in years past.

Cal Games 2007, eliminations.

A team on the red alliance had an autonomous mode that would ram the other side. This appeared to be intentional, as it wouldn't just go forwards, it would race forwards, turn, and race forwards again aiming for the blue alliance robots. One of the several times they hit just they snapped a weld or two on our ramps, forcing us to only use one for the match. That made it so we could only lift one robot, instead of two, and lost us the match.

Wasn't the first time we'd lost a ramp that way, and if it had happened that way at a regional I would have been more upset. The other few times we had lost a ramp was from playing defense, not sitting helplessly in autonomous. However, Cal Games is just an off-season, so while I didn't like what happened, I don't worry about it.

Silicon Valley 2008.

Somehow we managed to break two wheels. I have no idea how, and last time I asked, no one knew. It wasn't like the inside got chewed up, but it looked like it had dented from the outside...

Silicon Valley 2006.

Robot managed to develop its own autonomous...

Robot also managed to shoot one of its poof balls and hit the center of the top of the projected screen. The ball then fell onto a couple of refs heads... Anyone who's seen how high up that screen is knows that its quiet a feat. :ahh:

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

In 2006 during the Galileo quarterfinals our main breaker would cut out right after auton and so we would be dead for most of the match until another robot bumped into us. after our first match of doing this we told our alliance partners to bump us to get us back online, but they too were having electrical problems and weren't able to do anything either. and so we sat in the same position for about a min and a half and then we get bumped and quickly go score but by then its too little too late.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

did you get pushed sideways when these broke? I know thats how we broke a couple of our wooden wheels last year.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

2006 - Blew a victor on Einstein. Turned out someone dropped a screw in it. Oops.

2007 - Last qual match on Curie - After auto mode, the gripper automatically opened and dropped a keeper on the rack during teleop. Dropped us from 1 to 3 seed.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

2001: Finished 9th in galileo, didn't get picked

2002: Finals of mid-atlantic regional....our ball dumping basket was up getting ready to drop a load of balls into one of the goals 25 was grasping, and all of a sudden SLAM a cable snapped, we lost by a few points

2004: At PARC our robot decided to write its own auto mode, which deployed our pneumatic pistosn used to lift our robot off the groudn (200+ pounds of force) directly into the pneumatic tanks.....thankfully they only got dented

2005: Quarterfinals of NJ regional match #3, with only 3-4 seconds left I was driving the bot back towards the home zone to hopefully get the bonus 10 points...the arm didn't collapse all the way for some reason so we drove in to the wall hoping it would fold itself back up, and it didn't, i tried to turn aroudn and back in, but time expried

2006: Quarterfinals of Boston, our skyway wheel hub sheared itself off of the rest of the wheel...we hobbled along on 3 wheels trying to keep the other robots off of the ramp, however we were unable to move and 578 got up the ramp with literally no time left

2007: Had one of the best tube scoring averages on archimedes, somehow we got skipped for finals

2008: Our robot arrived a full 8 hours late on thursday, giving us a late start on work that would have taken all day thursday to complete anyway....we weren't fully running until saturday, where we lost in the semis to the dominant 39.


There is always a story to be told.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

Our team has started a new trend of building robots that don't listen to what we tell them. At three of our last four competitions (07 Atlanta FTC, 08 Arizona FTC, and 08 Arizona FRC) the robot sat still for more than half the time. It's been rather frustrating...

One I remember from 2006: we were in the semis in Sacramento and we were having drivetrain problems. We had just barely squeaked by in our last match, having lost one of our treads. We rivet a new one on and hope for the best; then they both fall off in the next match. Scrambling for time, we repair both of the wheels and put the robot back on the field for our third semi-final match, only to realize we forgot to put the chain back on one side of the drive. :rolleyes:

(852 and 1662 were amazing alliance partners, we managed to pull off a win in the finals!)

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

2006. Indiana Robotics Invitational. We had 2-speed pneumatically-shifted transmissions. The opposing alliance, we knew, would go straight over to the low goal and dump, so our plan was to sprint over to that wall at our top speed (something like 15ft/s that year :ahh: ) and shift down with only a few feet left. Tested in the pit; it worked great. Put the 'bot out on the field for quarterfinals, it sprinted across and totally neglected to shift. It slammed into the wall going 15ft/s, causing the whole robot to spin about 135 degrees to the right, and causing the main battery to break free of its Velcro mounting and disconnect from the robot, leaving us parked there for the rest of the match. It was my program that did this...and I still to this day have no explanation of what happened.

2007. IRI yet again. We were doing exceptionally well and made it into the finals. First out of three matches..we won; this match was not very eventful. Second match...the scores are so close...and a bit of pneumatic tubing on our arm cancelled our bonus points, causing us to lose the match. Third match, about 15 seconds into teleop, we run into the opposing alliance wall and...no response. On closer inspection post-match, our radio had come unplugged--nobody ever screwed it in.

2008. Great Lakes Regional. My autonomous code delays, as it is supposed to. Our partner (I don't remember who it was anymore...it was a practice match) drove out and was hovering slowly around the overpass; I think they were using a camera or something...they were attempting to knock down a ball. My code dutifully ticks off the second and a half delay, then drives forward. The partner's forklift is up above the overpass. We plow into the back of them, and continue pushing until they are laying on the floor sideways. :o That was a fun match...

Also this year, more than once we would get off-course but the code wouldn't sense it, and would faithfully count off gear-tooth sensor clicks--so we would be running into the center wall, the wheels would scrub enough so that it looked like we had travelled far enough cross-ways, and then it would start the 3rd segment run--back towards the alliance station, but since we weren't around the corner, we would run over the line we had already crossed, getting a penalty before the humans had a chance to touch it.

EDIT: In 2006, I did not personally get the pleasure of witnessing this event, but it looks like it was quite entertaining and smelly...

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

The 1251, 1626, 1758 alliance later went on to the Finals in which our unfortunate incedent was an overly loose turret chain, when drilling into it to fix it after Finals match 1, some aluminum shavings accidently fell onto our control board, giving us all kinds of crazy controller errors for Finals match 2.

In Palmetto 2008, one of the banebot motors that drives our elevator became loose in its planetary gearbox and proceeded to bind in SF match 2, we tried to fix it during our time out (i was 1 win apiece for red and blue alliance) and the bolt holding the gearbox down seized and prevented us from fixing it for our last finals match, perhaps causing us the win

Re: Most Unfortunate Incidents
 

Competition robots are just a gaggle of single points of failure flying in close formation.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incedents
 

So this brings back from memories. This was my senior year on 234, or as I like to call it, 'the year that we went against the most intimidating alliances and almost won.'

In the semi-finals at BMR in 2005, it was Teams 16, 234, and 393 vs. Teams 71, 269, and 1024. Really. That's a super alliance right there. Anyway, I won't go into all the logistics of the game that year, but essentially, our alliance lost by a couple of inches. In that year's game, the tetra that counted was the tetra that was higher. A tetra ended up being thrown under a goal and was propped against the floor and the field, giving it a couple inches on the one that had been dropped to the floor in autonomous. It was the deciding factor of the match. You want to talk about a hard loss, that was the hardest I think.

Tomorrow's story: how we took it to three matches in the QF's in Atlanta against 118, 229, and 312 :ahh: What a year that was.

Re: Most Unfortunate Incidents
 

: )