Hello Everyone,
Atlanta was a lot of fun and I have spent the last 18 years here so I speak from experience. All of the robots were extremely impressive and it seems as though the level of competition grows every year. After qualifying matches, we were one of three undefeated teams in the Edison division and because of a few tough breaks and our robot disconnecting we were unable to rack up a lot of rank points. As a team we decided to remain alliance captains when Team Unlimited chose us to join their alliance. They are a great team but we felt that we had a better chance to win with the Longhorns and Jr. Bomb Squad. This gave us the third pick and due to the great job of our scouts we picked two amazing alliance partners, the Longhorns or the Canadians as we began to call them, and the Jr. Bomb Squad.
We knew that we had a great alliance and knew that we stood a chance against the well-known PowerSurge, whose robot truly was amazing. Once the matches began we ran into an abundance of problems. First, in the semifinals one of our encoder motor wires fell out of place. This meant that our back gears were grinding with each other during autonomous mode which almost severely broke the robot. Also in the semifinals we began to notice that our robot started slowing down, mainly the drivetrain. We realized that the two motors were only running at between 15-25%. This gave us an added obstacle to overcome. We were bale to overcome Powersurge and their great alliance in two close matches by blocking them on low power.
In the final matches our autonomous mode was so severely off that we had to take ourselves out of the matches and allow our alliance partners to compete. We trusted them when we chose them and our choices paid off as they won the final two matches with their great driving and consistent autonomous modes.
We wanted to thank all of the teams for coming to Atlanta and it was a lot of fun.We hope to see you all next year!
-Brad