[Al3+]

Last year (2009), if I remember correctly, we were still being inspected when we were due for our first qualification match. We ended up missing it and sending a lone human player.

The robot weighed in at around 150 pounds the weekend before ship. We had to take off a lot of supports and other things and I believe it was still overweight when we shipped it. We ended up barely passing the weight requirement, by a couple of ounces. We also had to file down the frame quite a bit in some places, because we had (stupidly) built it to exact dimensions and it rested on a tilt, so it wouldn't fit into the box.

Our swerve drive, the product of seemingly half of our entire build, turned out to be ineffective; the bot could barely turn in our second qualification match. So we fixed the wheels in position and used standard tank drive for the rest of competition, throwing our efforts out the window.

In over half our matches, we didn't move. We found that a jaguar was reversed and the wheels were working against each other. So the jag was rewired, and the code was inverted, and the two canceled each other out and we still weren't moving in the right direction. It took us awhile to get it straight. Then one side seemed to be driving faster than the other, so the code was adjusted to fix it. Later we realized the culprit: only three wheels were touching the ground at a time. We also had no autonomous on Thursday, so we hastily put in 5 or 10 seconds of driving full forward. This resulted in us slamming hard into the opposite side of the field every match.

2010 went much more smoothly for us in terms of number of catastrophes, even if we still didn't do remarkably well.