What was your teams worst expierence during competition?

[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.

[cmrnpizzo14]

Originally Posted by Peter Matteson

I have a lot of stories that would shock many of you or just have you rolling on the floor, but I'll stick with the simple one that used to happen all the time with the old control systems.

The match starts and you realize your robot isn't turned on. This was a common occurence up until around 2004 or 2005.

Also for a bonus there's the the time we almost took out the scoring table at the UTC New England Regional in 2004:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/17725

I see that your team started doing better once you learned to turn the robot on

[Caleb Sykes]

Not a terrible moment, but funny and nerve-wracking.
In autonomous in our first practice match, the robot shot 3 discs into the wall, then drove backward 2 feet, then proceeded to spin in circles in place for the rest of autonomous. Nothing broke, but it scared all of us.

Aren't untested auto modes so much fun

[Jay O'Donnell]

This isn't the worst story in our teams history but it's the one I was on the team for. At Battlecry this year I was driving and we were in the middle of our best match yet that weekend, when all of a sudden we stopped moving. The FTA ran over, took out his phone, and took a picture of our laptop and left without saying a word. Our laptop had blue-screened in the middle of the match.

[Answer42]

Having our teams mentor scream at us for an hour after another teams mentor helped us improve our shooter at a regional.

[BrendanB]

The 2013 Granite State Regional + some time.

Our team bit of way more then we could pull off aiming much higher than our previous years. We had grown a lot both in resources, students, and mentors and our design reflected it. Growing pains as we call them!

When we bagged our robot we had a drivebase, barely an electronics board, a shooter, a disc storage system that had been made that week, and a 30 point climber that had worked good during testing but needed more time to improve. We kept the shooter and disc manipulation system off as our withholding allowance to finish them. The week leading up to GSR was exhausting as we rushed to finish our practice robot and work on our disc manipulation system and shooter. I remember driving to Manchester on Wednesday to drop the bagged robot and tools off which our programming team was just starting autonomous/shooting control.

Thursday of the regional we spent most of the day ripping the bagged robot apart to rebuild after we made discoveries with our practice robot. What took the longest was our shooter was on slides to raise up and down to overcome defensive blocking. Our climber was mounted to the side and would swing out over the platform so we were climbing above our center of gravity. By the end of the day we had an inspected robot but no time to debug the systems as a whole. Additionally we found our climber and shooter interfered with each other by 1/2in when the climber swung out. With the shooter system not working up to par we took if off first thing Friday morning so we could at least climb. Due to all of the rebuilding there were technical glitches popping up everywhere but our pit crew kept working through every hurdle even though the entire team was running off of exhaustion from the past 3 weeks. We finished the weekend as quarterfinalists with 2791 and 78.

While it is an experience everyone on our team would prefer to forget it was a very powerful weekend and was a time every team needs to go through. Our team was young but we were learning how to take our team from the rookies that kept it simple to the veterans who aimed much higher.

In the following weeks our team grew much stronger as we looked forward to our week 6 event in Maine. We had kept every mechanism in the bag at GSR not knowing what would stay and what go but all we knew was we had to redesign. The programmers worked diligently with our practice arm to speed up climbing from 50 seconds to 20 seconds. The mechanical team worked on some bucket hopper prototypes and repackaged our mechanisms by placing the climber on top the shooter with a simple pivot system replacing a complex lead screw. Luckily for us our entire upgrades only required 28lbs of prefabricated materials as most of our new robot was already in the bag.

At the Pine Tree Regional we took our robot down the drivebase and worked our way up making a new electronics board, modified our climber, and mounted the new shooter assembly. All this and inspection was completed by 1pm. I never thought more then 8 people could work effectively in a 10x10 pit but boy was I wrong. Our new robot did have some technical problems but our pit crew powered through and after 13 long elimination matches we were the 2nd seed (12-1) with a robot that could shoot 3 in autonomous, 4 cycles, and then climb for 30. We were selected by the number 1 seed 2648 and 2386 rounded out our alliance.

The rest of our 2013 season is history and while it was the longest build/competition season of my life our team has never been prouder of what we accomplished!

Below are two photos one of our original robot at the Granite State Regional on Thursday and one of our robot later in the season.

GSR:
http://i.imgur.com/mny2Q2n.jpg?1

Now:
http://i.imgur.com/IGE6jY8.jpg?1

[Travis Hoffman]

Oh let's see...

2001 (my first year): Failed to make the elims at any of our events. We finished 11th in our division at Epcot but weren't selected. Plus, you know, Diabolical Dynamics FML.

2002 CMP: We faced off against 60 in the semifinals - this was one of the legendary bots back in the day. Picking up two huge goals with their beastly arms and swinging them around like a mace. Knowing what 60 was capable of, we decided to have some fun and slam into the center goal as quickly as possible at match start to see if we could disrupt their goal latching. Well...the collision was pretty awesome. 60's arm ended up breaking (they had a replacement and fixed it before the next match), but they still locked onto the goal and were able to win the match with their beastly drivetrain. Our extruded aluminum t-slot frame (item material) was not happy after that match. The next year, and every year since, we've used welded aluminum tubing in our base frames and haven't looked back.

2003 Buckeye: Short wheelbase plus tall leading edge of bot plus king of the hill ramp with opponents waiting at the top = on your backside frequently. A pneumatic wheelie bar fixed that issue, and we actually had a solid season after that. That bot was pretty beastly - our first application of a shift on the fly dog-gear transmission, patterned after 45's shared design. Too bad that robot was stolen recently. Losers.

Losing with 1114 and 1006 in the 2004 Canadian Regional finals, after winning the equivalent of a regional at the first ever 2-field super regional. This was also simultaneously my best event experience ever.

Losing with 1114 and 70 in the 2006 Curie elims.

The entire 2010 season, including our North Carolina Regional win, which was only accomplished through smoke, mirrors, and liberal application of zip ties. Oh yeah, we managed to coerce 1519 into kicking a soccer ball into Dean Kamen's face while playing defense against them. It's on YouTube. That was interesting.

Not picking 16 at the 2012 CMP kinda sucked.

I feel like I'm missing something.....oh yeah, that. Well we don't need to bring that up again. But it would be the #1 worst experience overall, for me personally and many others. The sad thing is we were that close to having it be one of the greatest experiences in team history.

[cadandcookies]

2011. Tried swerve. Didn't move for 1.5 regionals.

[George C]

2009 Lunacy. Standing in the pit area at Waterloo, watching the drive team not quite running back from a practice match with the bot on its cart, watching the bot fall off the wagon with many hands trying to grab it, watching a fancy cast aluminum lazy susan at the base of our tower pop apart and then watching all those ball bearings scatter. We found most of them, put the bearing back together and went on to the finals at Waterloo, semi finals at GTR and then Championships.

2013 - Falling off the pyramid on several occasions including after dumping four at the top a couple of times. 20 points for dump, zero points for climb.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Damiaen_Florian

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

I haven't personally seen anything like that... but I have heard stories of it happening. 330, at IRI, in 2002, had that in at least a couple of matches, something about the batteries being heat-damaged so they wouldn't hold a charge properly--then the controller didn't get enough power to detect the E-stop! (Two years later, backup batteries for the Robot Controller were introduced.)