Thanks again to our wonderful Jill Johns for the day's summery. The Falcons have made it to the finals of the AUVSI & ONR International Robosub competition. They run tomorrow at 1:20 pm but tune in at 1pm for the live webcast. See link below. The team is currently in 7th place out of 31 teams, mostly universities, from 9 countries
Day 6 Robosub Competition – July 27, 2013
Today was a happy day! John and Dylan once again got to Transdec early and first. They were followed shortly by four other teams. Our team is causing waves and getting universities like Cornell to try and rethink rules to keep them competitive. They asked to change the sign-up rule to a lottery instead of first-come first-pick. Teams are taking notice of Falcon Robotics!
Our practice run was at 8:30 followed shortly after by our semi-final run at 9 am. The weather conditions were really good for our robot – cloudy and overcast with pretty much no sun. We didn’t really need to adjust any vision values and our robot was set. We got in the water and on our first autonomous run we went through the gate, went on a straight path, followed the first marker, hit the red buoy, followed the next marker and went through the next gate. Those are precisely the six missions we programmed the robot to make. Success! So many other teams have been struggling this year that we felt we had a pretty good chance. We knew we were in the top ten and closer to the top five. So we kept that first run and stopped the mission. We still had time so we did some practice runs with the lights on the robot turned on. For this year we found they didn’t help, but we got some good video footage and logged the runs so we have data to work with for next year.
Then it was just sitting around and waiting. We watched some more teams do their runs and talked to spectators who were interested in our robot. The event is free and open to the public, so many people came back to ask questions. Everyone is so impressed that we are high school team and our students have been able to accomplish so much. We had one more practice run. John adjusted the code to try and get more points on the last mission. It didn’t work well in the practice run but we still have time to work on the code. After that just more waiting and waiting.
Finally after 6 pm the last semi-finals were completed and the teams that were going on to the finals were announced. And WE MADE IT!! So on our third year of the competition we know we can compete with, and beat, the big teams. We were ranked seventh and they are taking seven teams plus a wild card team tomorrow. We mentors are so excited, and we are impressing upon the students how big this really is. We have the first practice time tomorrow and the first finals run in the afternoon. So we still have time to work on the code and try and get some additional points. Anything can happen. Some of the big giants have fallen, and we could just creep in there and take a higher spot. Even if we don’t we’ll be happy because we have met all of our goals for the competition. We are raising the bar and people are taking notice of Falcon Robotics.
The finals start around 1 pm tomorrow, and all the runs are on live streaming on the Internet. We hope everybody will watch us. So tune in tomorrow to:
http://www.auvsifoundation.org/found...tions/robosub/ at 1 pm.