[Urban Hawk]

well... we may not have been the fastest to break stuff but when we do it we do it quite thoughly.
we have pure bad luck

three years ago:
Half way though the Chesapeake Regionals our robot caught on fire.

After the competition, as we were taking the robot home, it caught on fire again in the back of my moms van. Apparently someone forgot to disconnect the battery.
(remember... no smoking in the car)



Two years ago:
We were testing our robot out by having our robot do burn-outs in the School's cafeteria, while being watched by the schools janitors, and we effectively turned the floor from white to black. However during the testing we lost control of our robot it slammed into the wall breaking off some of the the tiles on the wall and bending the axle on one of our wheels. (The janitors were laughing hysterically at that.)

While at competition our control system wasn't working in the first match. They let us do a rematch and again it didn't work. We took it to the pits and disassembled it only to find out that the school was getting a 2 hour early dismissal and that according to their policy all but 2 of our team had to leave (luckily my mom was there so i stayed), had drive through the storm (even though it wasn't snowing at all at the competition) and then they turned around once they got to the school and drove back. To top it off one of the officials told us after they left that there was nothing wrong with our system and that it was their own system that was having problems and wouldn't even let us redo the first match. in essence we disassembled it for nothing and then had almost no one left to reassemble it.

We got it fixed in time for the 7th match. Durring the 7th match the motor on our arm designed to lift the tubes was too powerful and snapped itself in half. (We latter tested the motor and found it had so much torque it could flip itself over while running even though it was a square.)

During the 8th match we pushed the rest of the arm of the robot through the floor of the robot and the 150 pound tested fishing line we were using snapped and wrapped around our tires and ruined the wheel motors which ended any hopes to redeem ourselves.





last year:
in the second round of the competition we got slammed by two robots at the same time which twisted our entire frame and made it impossible for us to drive and effectively eliminated us from the competition.
Also while we were trying to fix the robot we tried to test the wheels. One of my teammates got his hand caught in the wheel and had to go to the hospital.





this year:
during the second day one of my teammates tripped and punched a hole in the wall
i wonder what else will happen this year.....