What was your teams worst expierence during competition?

[FilthyArgonian]

I wasn't there for this one, but in 2002 I think (before 1086 was known as Blue Cheese) our robot caught on fire twice during the NASA/VCU Regional

[DampRobot]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

That mentor sounds like a real winner.

Seconded.

[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.

[mechanical_robot]

Originally Posted by inkling16

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

Noooo they arent fun hahah

[IndySam]

2011 Being red carded in a quarter-finals match by a person not even part of the ref crew because he was talked into it by a persuasive student from the other alliance. BTW video showed the ref crew was correct and the certain person was completely wrong. Still waiting for the apology.


2012 Cincinnati rule, enough said.

[mechanical_robot]

Originally Posted by IndySam

2011 Being red carded in a quarter-finals match by a person not even part of the ref crew because he was talked into it by a persuasive student from the other alliance. BTW video showed the ref crew was correct and the certain person was completely wrong. Still waiting for the apology.


2012 Cincinnati rule, enough said.

Wow some people and what they will do just to win.

[MichaelBick]

2012 San Diego was pretty awful for us. Immediately after hybrid ended during our first qual match, our driver ran full speed backward into the coop bridge. Our electronics board happened to be really exposed(poor design). The bridge ended up destroying quite a few victors, and we had to completely redesign the electronics board, missing the rest of our qual matches except for one. On the bright side we had no problems with the new electronics board and were finalists at the LA regional(the best our team had ever done at that time).

[Chadfrom308]

About the power switches: In Waterford District (I think anyways) The Captains (i think) had their power switch at the top front of their robot. When they went to get a ball under the bridge, we started to balance and we hit their power switch on the robot and turned them off

And anyways, for us, the worst experience was our whole 2013 year (Okay, it wasn't *that* bad, but we could barely do anything)! Anyways, we learned a couple of things:

1. Gravity is your friend and works 100% of the time
2. Picking up frisbees from the ground is pretty hard and not worth it
3. Don't store frisbees horizontally
4. Don't make it 2wd and have 4 idling wheels
5. Make room for electronics
6. Auton is more important than you think
7. Design your robot in CAD

And many more...

[E Dawg]

We had a 10-point climber. Our driver tried to go for a 20-point climb.

MAGIC SMOKE ANYBODY!!!!

[Jon Stratis]

While I won't elaborate on here, our worst experience at a competition was another team acting in a decidedly non-GP fashion (particularly off the field) towards our team for most of the competition.

If you want to talk robot-related issues... 3 match of the finals in Logo Motion, when our lifter broke during autonomous mode. It had to be the most heart-crushing instance I've experienced on my team, yet the drivers took it in stride and led us (through amazing defensive play) to a very, very close victory!

[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.