What was your teams worst expierence during competition?

[Damiaen_Florian]

WPI Regional 2011

The regional itself was fantastic and really well run however during our first practice match our robot started to move then randomly jerked around and started spinning around in circles. When we E-stopped it the robot was still moving all around the field, and even after the match ended it was still going! The FTA (or maybe it was a ref I forget) had to run out onto the field and chase the robot and manually shut it off, it was something they said they've never seen before

[pfreivald]

Random robot freezing in the semifinals at Buckeye last year. Happened two games in a row, had never happened before (through countless practice and two regionals) and has never happened since. :/

[JeremyLansing]

This year at IRI, we re-calibrated our autonomous and ended up changing the power value for the shooter motors. When we built the code and deployed it to the robot, all the code got corrupted. Our programmer had to try to rewrite our entire robot code in the half hour or so we had before our first match. In the end he didn't have time, and we ended up playing the match with no control over our pneumatics, and both joysticks inverted. Probably the most stressed I have ever been at a competition. Luckily we had enough of a break for him to fix it before our next match. Still had a lot of problems that weekend, but it just felt like a terrible omen to have that happen right before our first match at our first time at IRI.

[Taylor]

2008 IRI.
We got tangled with our teammates in autonomous mode, rammed full-speed into the dividing wall. The impact tore out our battery ground, and it came to a rest on our IFI controller.
The DSK song "Robot On Fire" may or may not have been inspired by that.
http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2008iri_qm17

[BurkeHalderman]

2013 Queen City Regional

During one of our last qualification matches an opposing robot decided to lower their climbing mechanism past their frame perimeter and ram us while we were shooting from the pyramid. The impact forced our shooter down and bent our intake and shooter. We went from about 85-90% accuracy to 65% and barely managed to win our next few matches to secure the 1st seed position. Sadly we couldn't fix it and lost in the quarterfinals. That was the first time ever we were confident we had a shot to win a regional, just bad luck. We were all very disappointed. And our shooter continued to plague us with problems for our next two regionals after that.

I did talk the drivers from the team that hit us and they ensured me in no way did they intend to damage us so no hard feelings there.

[Christopher149]

Huh, strangely glad to know that we weren't the only one to be turned off by a frisbee. We had it happen one time when our human player was trying to load our robot.

Here are what I remember as the worst moments, for various reasons.

2012 Rebound Rumble - Trying to balance on the bridge, accelerate too fast, begin falling backwards, and bend a bunch of stuff. None was very critical, but a damaged robot is never fun. Video used to exist at TBA, but it's not there right now.

2011 Logomotion - At TC I think, we managed to get our lift stuck on the scoring rack, and that was quite distressing for how long it took to get it unstuck.

2010 Breakaway - The whole robot. It's like it was anit-designed.

2009 Luncay - We were in the quarterfinals, and we were up one game to zero at TC (http://www.thebluealliance.com/team/857/2009). The second match, we had a bar protecting our intake roller that was ziptied on because our previous one had broken off. However, the zipties failed, we exceeded the allowable dimensions, incurred a 10 penalty, lost the match by 4 points, and went on to lose the third game by 3 points (sooo close to semis....).

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Way back in 2002 we were against the dreaded Beatty CrawlerBot at the Midwest Regional. In the finals we had finally succeeded in steering the Beatty machine to the side of the field where it couldn't score. We (111, 45 and 79) had clearly beat them until our human player in the excitement started scoring points for them. After being #1 seed and finishing qualifying at #1, we lost the finals.

[Everett33]

This year at the Grand Blanc district our robot took a hard hit from the opposing team defending us. The ribbon cable came out of the sidecar rendering us a giant paperweight for the rest of the match. Once back in the pits we quickly sourced some of the appropriate bolts and made sure that could not happen again.

[yarden.saa]

So, Israel Regional 2011:
We were connecting our arm in the first day. The arm weight was about 30 pounds. The arm had an axle which was already in place and a spring piston that carried the arm weight. The spring piston was connected temporally with plier patent and after couple of minutes the arm fell on my head....
It was VERY PAINFUL

[Invictus3593]

Out of all the bad things that could've happened, the worst thing was that our robot was deliberately tipped over in one of the early matches at the 2013 Razorback regional, taking us from 2nd seed to 6th seed. Luckily, our robot was welded together really well so nothing broke XD

[MichelB]

Tried to show off during a competition by doing donuts, completely shatttered a gear box...replaced it in 30 minutes though (this was with my old team)

[MikLast]

2013: First year, only thing we could do was climb the rings and play defense.

The climber broke before our first match.
(Still got highest rookie seed though!)

2014: first district event, just after auto we lost comms to the robot, and for some reason it kept doing the command it was sent. a couple times it just spun around, but one time it was going full speed.

To our alliances driver station.
Lets just say we burned that carpet real good.

Our second event, we did pretty well, besides the fact we shredded our gears until we realized we were going to be the #8 alliance captain. we had absolutely no scouting done, as we didnt really expect to become one. Still had a blast though.

2015: first event, placed second seed, had great scouting, got a great alliance, until our partner had a bad battery. also, 10 agonizing minutes of seeing if this counted.

[asid61]

Not being able to move 6/10 matches at championships. We had a really good chance too...

[Dr. Shocker]

http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2011roc_qm41

If we ignore the fact that in 2011 year we got second in 2 regionals where we lost to the winning alliance by less than 5 pts, and in both cases a mini-bot decided it didn't want to work, I would have to say this match. During autonomous the uber-tube opened our pneumatic valve, so we had no pressure, and we were eventually able to put the tube we had onto the rack, but that was basically it the whole match. If it hadn't been for that mistake, we probably would have ranked second instead of third. Oh well.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Dr. Shocker

http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2011roc_qm41

If we ignore the fact that in 2011 year we got second in 2 regionals where we lost to the winning alliance by less than 5 pts, and in both cases a mini-bot decided it didn't want to work, I would have to say this match. During autonomous the uber-tube opened our pneumatic valve, so we had no pressure, and we were eventually able to put the tube we had onto the rack, but that was basically it the whole match. If it hadn't been for that mistake, we probably would have ranked second instead of third. Oh well.

That is because the 1126/1551 combination is cursed in qualifying matches, for reasons none can fathom.

Our worst year yet was this year--we had a robot that performed at home, and was an absolute catastrophe on the field. We somehow got picked to go into the tournament and had our two best games in the quarterfinals...as soon as it was all over, our bot was working as we designed it to work. :/