Falcon Robotics makes "Einstein" of ROBOSUB!

[falconmaster]

Day 7 Robosub!

Thanks again to all our supporters and friends and family. The following is a summary of the days activities.



Day 7 Robosub 2013 Competition – July 28, 2013

One last day at Transdec and the Robosub competition. We still got up early and arrived around 7 am. We had a practice time at 8 am, so we needed to have everything ready. The weather was still overcast and cloudy and we were hoping it would hold on and last a while longer. During the practice run we tried a new task, which was to have the robot move sideways through a gate, like parallel parking. It worked pretty well after a little adjustment for drift and we were anxious to see how it would work during the actual competition. Then it was just wait, wait, wait.



Finally the official final competition started at 1 pm. Before the competition several of the obstacles were moved to different positions than the practice set-up. One path in particular that was pointing right to a gate all during practice time as aimed at the post instead of the center of the gate. And the gate was turned to a very different angle. Not very nice, Dave! So we had a little bit of time to crunch numbers and work on the settings, but we were first up. And wouldn’t you know it, the sun peeked through just a little bit. It was enough to throw off our settings some.



We were ready to go by 1:20 pm and Disarae was in the media booth with Zoz Brooks to do a play-by-play. Our robot started off great and approached the red buoy. But it had been moved just a little bit and our robot thought it hit the buoy before it actually did. So we brought it back to the beginning to do a little change in the code and start over again. By then the sun made a difference in how the robot saw color, and we weren’t able to track the path. Also, one of the thrusters lost power because the connection came lose. Put it all together and it kind of spelled disaster for Sovereign Falcon 2.0. We did struggle for the rest of the 20 minutes and were only able to accomplish going through the gate. Then all we could do was watch the other robots and see what they were capable of. We don’t have the final rankings yet but we know we didn’t finish in the top five.



Although the competition didn’t end on a high note, we are still very proud that we made it to the finals and that our robot completed all the tasks it was programmed to do during the semi-final run. We certainly accomplished a lot and we now have a checklist of things to work on so we can be more competitive next year. We already have new innovative ideas and are working on more partnerships to develop some different techniques. So we’ll move forward – onward and upward.



We ended the evening by going to the awards dinner, which was a luau on the beach. We enjoyed some good food and then listened as the special awards were given out. We weren’t expecting anything, so we were pretty surprised when they called our school for one of three best outreach programs! We received a check for $500, so that was just a great bonus. Now we’ll have to find a way to top our outreach programs again. We won’t party too much because we’ll get up and leave early tomorrow morning. Phoenix, here we come.



Thanks again Jill for writing the summary. We finished 8th in the finals and that makes us 8th in the world right now, not bad for a bunch of teenagers from south Phoenix! We are already making plans to remedy the problems we encountered in the finals for next year. We will be back and raring to go, we still have unfinished business. That ends our reports for this years Robosub, See ya!

more info here
http://www.auvsifoundation.org/found...tions/robosub/

final runs here
http://new.livestream.com/accounts/3...events/2280186