For those of you who attended week 1 events, and won an award of any kind. I’d be interested in hearing what you won any particular award for. For instance, I’m interested to see if the autonomous award will typically be awarded for the best integration of autonomous actions, seeing as many teams choose not to have a fully autonomous sandstorm.
Quality award. We beat up our robot pretty bad by starting on Hab lvl2 every match, and fell a few times from Hab lvl3 without breaking. Also defenders would break themselves by ramming into our robot.
3 Likes
At the Festival de robotique de Montréal, 3986 - Express-O won:
- Regional Winners; and
- Industrial Design Award sponsored by General Motors
Our team won our district event’s autonomous award. We chose to largely fly by camera control, though we had some automation for our arm/elevator system and small startup procedure.
We won the award largely due to the very visible difference between our sandstorm performance and nearly everyone else at our event. We had absolutely no problem scoring whatever game piece we started with each match and usually we were on our way to get a second before the curtain was raised.
What is your bot made of? Titanium?
We won Engineering Inspiration at Del Mar, and along with a cool robot and a bunch of outreach stuff that we normally do, apparently the thing that pushed us over the top was our freshman involvement. We’re a large team, upwards of 60 kids (and then another 20 mentors), and we have 35 freshman this year.
Many other teams (and us in the past) basically treat freshman like observers, to be useful in a year or two, but not now. We’ve been making a major push to train them before the season starts and have them doing useful and necessary tasks through the entirety of build season.
Specifically, our drive team consists of a student drive coach (11th grade) that used to be the primary driver for 2 years, the technician is a programmer (11th grade), and then driver 1 and 2, and the human player are all freshman.
3 Likes
Sadly not, just a classic WCD aluminum chassis
We (3255) won the creativity award for our lv 3 climber at Del Mar, something we redesigned pretty last minute and only got working a day or 2 before the regional. It was the culprit of a brownout issue on practice day, giving us little time to practice. Worked great though, possibly the fastest at the regional, though I haven’t timed anything to check for sure. Only failed when climbing once, during elims, due to said brownout issue coming back to bite us.
1 Like
My team had our first of two district events this past weekend and took home two awards. The first was the UL Industrial Safety Award for our FRC safety outreach and our FRC safety app.
The second was the Creativity Award, for this (we are 5401):
Oh and if you count being event winner an award, then we technically won three awards.
4 Likes
It worked pretty well for being last minute. Our scouting data has you all as the 4th highest for specifically climbing at Del Mar, no info on how fast it was though. Our climber was dumping our robot sideways up until a week before. I believe we do ours in 15 seconds, and you guys were either that fast or slightly faster.
(scores are average HAB level at the end, over all the matches, yes we’re aware it’s a dumb way to do it)
How does this work in the rules? I was strongly under the impression that your robot must start with your bumpers in the bumper zone prior to the start of the match and only supported by the HAB.
2 Likes
Engineering Excellence Award. We have over 120 hours of in house CNC work put into our robot and 450 different parts all machined in house for our 2 robots. We had a 10 second hab lvl 3 climb that we did every match as well as a very fast cargo intake and elevator.
Bumper zone is determined based on IF your robot is laid down on its wheels (so you can start on your side if you want). Only thing im not sure about is the HAB thing, I’m assuming by G1-D you just have to be in the HAB zone, nothing saying you arent allowed to be supported by alliance partners or the alliance wall.
Bumper zone is determined by the STARTING CONFIGURATION.
2 Likes
I have the same question here. Being tipped up on the end doesn’t seem like a legal STARTING CONFIGURATION to me. If tipped up on end is the STARTING CONFIGURATION for 5401’s robot , then the FRAME PERIMETER is defined by that STARTING CONFIGURATION (see R1), and the BUMPER ZONE and BUMPERS are defined by that STARTING CONFIGURATION.
I do think 5401’s idea is very creative, but I don’t think it is legal in the rules as written.
So we did confirm with the ref at our competition that this was a legal starting configuration. I’ve also re-read the section of the game manual regarding frame perimeter and fail to see how it’s not legal. Do you mind citing the exact section of the rules it supposedly violates? (Not trying to be snarky…I’m genuinely curious.)
My two teams won awards:
- 548 - Engineering Inspiration at FIM Gibralter
- 2458 - Judges award at FMA Hattsboro Horsham - This was an incredible step for a small team from an incredibly small school. This is the first year they have ever submitted for awards and even though they did not win, this was a phenomenal accomplishment. So proud of them.
1 Like
5987 won the Creativity Award at ISR #1 for the Hatch Panel detection neural network we trained.
2 Likes
It’s a bit of a tough one–I’ll start by saying that you’ll want to check with the referees again at your next event.
But, the easiest way to go about showing illegality is this:
- Frame Perimeter is defined in Starting Configuration, R1.
- Bumpers are required to be attached to the Frame Perimeter, R25 and R30G.
- All parts of the robot must be within the vertical projection of the Frame Perimeter when in Starting Configuration, R2.
- Robot must be in Starting Configuration at match start, G1C.
If the robot is in its starting configuration when it starts that way, then the Frame Perimeter is incorrectly defined, bumpers are not attached to the Frame Perimeter, and bumpers are not in compliance with G23/R25. If it is NOT in its defined Starting Configuration, then G1C, fix or disable.
There are a couple of other options as well–part of Starting Configuration is generally held to be that the robot has to keep itself in there without outside support, including the Alliance Wall (though I can’t seem to find that in this year’s rule set).
It is certainly a weird tangle of rules. I actually think their OK with regards to the FRAME PERIMETER and bumpers, as the FRAME PERIMETER is defined by wrapping a string around the BUMPER ZONE, which is defined “in reference to the ROBOT standing normally on a flat floor” (R25) (Not the STARTING CONFIGURATION). So Based on that, they would have a valid FRAME PERIMETER and valid bumpers.
The thing that they do violate though, is the R2 blue box:
If a ROBOT is designed as intended and each side is pushed up against a vertical wall (in STARTING CONFIGURATION and with BUMPERS removed), only the FRAME PERIMETER (or minor protrusions) will be in contact with the wall.
Which basically redefines the FRAME PERIMETER to be in reference to the STARTING CONFIGURATION, and would make this design illegal.
(Personally I think they should allow this design though, as it is really cool and innovative!)