Archive: Around Town

On March 28, Ithaca High School's FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Team 639 Code Red Robotics students returned from their second and final regional competition in Cleveland, Ohio- the Buckeye Regional Competition.  The team also attended the Tech Valley Regional Competition, a similar event held in Albany, NY earlier in March.

At these competitions, Code Red Robotics was one of approximately 40 high school robotics teams that used their robot to work together with two other teams' robots to try to earn as many points as possible in this year's game, Recycle Rush, and thus be eligible to attend the World Championships event in St. Louis, MO, a feat they have accomplished for the past three years.

At the Tech Valley Regional Competition in Troy, NY (March 19-21), Code Red enjoyed their first of two regional competitions in the season.  In the very first practice match, there was an unfortunate error with the autonomous code and the robot drove into the wall, bending the claw (a necessary robot component).  As a result, the team spent most of the practice day fixing this issue, calibrating, and testing to prepare us for the qualification matches that began on Friday.  It was an unexpected challenge, but Code Red tackled it efficiently.

The second bus left early Friday morning to meet the Code Red members at RPI, the competition site, and all members attended the Opening Ceremonies.  In the qualification matches that followed the ceremonies, Code Red was ranked highly initially because of high-scoring matches due to strong alliance pairings, but over the course of the qualification matches, dropped in rankings, and wasn't selected to participate in the elimination matches.  This experience was a learning opportunity for Code Red and its members.

At the Buckeye Regional Competition in Cleveland, OH (March 26-28), Code Red members could be found working on upgrading our robot and rolling out a new subsystem we would use on Friday afternoon. The first use of this subsystem resulted in the claws being knocked off of the robot entirely due to a driving error, but the team was not to be deterred by this setback, and certainly learned from the mistakes.  Finally, the team managed to calibrate the 'wings' system, which they were finally able to successfully use (after many hours of debugging and calibration) in the final qualification match on Saturday.   

During the alliance selection before the beginning of the playoff matches, Code Red was picked by the 6th seed captain, and graciously accepted this invitation to compete. The quarterfinal matches ended up being the best matches that the robot played across the entire season, partly due to the new subsystem, and partly due to our ability to cooperate with the other robots in the alliance.

However, the team's average score was not enough to advance it into the semifinal rounds, but team morale was high on the bus ride home. After six intense weeks of designing and building the robot, and after spending countless hours trying to work out all the bugs, they were finally able to see every aspect of our robot function as originally intended.

v11i21