Why Losers Lose?

[Marc S.]

This year my team focused realy hard on design and effectivness. But in the two regionals we competed in this yearwe didn't even make finals. The reasons:

1. Loss of robot comunication.(whether it be the controboard, robot, or field at fault)

2. Making that last second discision to hang another tube with only 15sec(or less) to go.

3. Something on the robot breaks.(arm, manipulater, minibot,etc.)

4. Team isn't being consistant.(scoring lots of points only counts if you can do it again.)

In san diego we went into quaters and won the 1st match 80-38. 2nd match we were hanging many tubes while our opponents only hung 1. During the endgame we hung a tube at 10sec and weren't able to align with the pole in time. Lost the match 50-53. 3rd match we lost communication after autonomous and completely blocked one of our own racks.This was caused by a malfunctioning usb port in the control board. Lost 29-71. Just painfull.

In L.A. we flew by quarters with scores of 129 & 128. In semi's however we lost the 1st match because of a communication problem, 28-60. The robot didn't even move in automous. The banebot 775's we were using shorted out and caused the robot to reboot(something that also caused 781 to be disabled in einstein finals. The next match the same thing happened but communication was restored half-way through the match. Our partners minibot wasn't working properly and didn't go up the pole, ours did but according to the judges it was to high, something that never happened before and never happened since. Lost 61-86.

In champs qualifications we got rid of the com probs but ran into little probs that kept us down.