Just got back from Atlanta... congratulations to the teams on the winning alliance! They played very well, and it was ironic that a pretty good imitation of our robot (2820 Longhorns) would end up beating us.
Power Surge had a great time competing, although we had a dissapointing end. We went undefeated in qualifying matches, despite dropping and breaking our primary robot laptop, having a battery charger break on us and a 12V battery burn up, and other strange problems that we didn't have all season. We were the #2 seeded alliance just before match 5/6, because #1 Unlimited had more ranking points than us and was also undefeated. So in match 5, we pulled one of our 2 puck-rack autonomous modes (which we've actually had since before the NJ regional, but have kept secret for strategy purposes
), so that in tele-op we could score for the other team and catch up on ranking points. We ended up winning that match 222 - 208, which was the highest individual and combined score at the World Championships. We ended up being the #1 seeded alliance going into elimination rounds, and won the semi-finals 2-0. However, during the last match of the semifinals, we somehow lost all communication with our robot, and it burned out both drive motors when it backed into a field wall and got stuck. We were able to replace both motors before our next match, however.
In the finals, everything went wrong. In the first match, a disconnected rotation sensor caused our autonomous mode to completely fail, and then we had a very strange problem that we still haven't been able to figure out. Even though the robot had full power in Autonomous mode, in tele-op mode the drive motors slowed to a snail's pace, even though we were using the same program and joysticks that had worked fine all day. This made it very easy for our opponents to block us, since we had enough trouble moving around without interference. Although we were still able to score some pucks, we lost the match by about 20 points. In the second match we had the same problem, except even worse. Our robot could only move at about 40-50% of its usual power, enabling our two opponents, working together, to keep us from scoring anything. Apparently our alliance partner lost communication with their robot, and so was not able to score either.
Ah well... that's the way it goes. We did the best we could, but some problems are just out of your control. It was a great and exciting competition, nonetheless. We had two awesome alliance partners for the elimination rounds, 121 Rhode Rage and 110 MFS Foxes, who were very gracious when our alliance was defeated because of our problems.
-Jonathan