FTC Qualifier #1 Results

https://www.worldhumorawards.org/uncategorized/u92mfmsg 6 January 2016 / Jacob Kauffmann / 0 Comments

We’re proud to say that we placed 4th in the first Missouri FTC qualifier!

https://tankinz.com/kxgykss97d Our goal for this specific competition was just to check measurements and see if our bot has the potential of climbing the mountain. Our first round and first attempt to climb the mountain resulted in one of the gears in the robot to come loose and fall off which caused one of the gear trains to not function anymore. This was due to the fact that we combined Vex and Tetrix parts, but this problem was solved by switching out the axles. Even though the gear train did not fall apart anymore from then on, we still needed to tighten all the wheels after every match, as some of them continued to come loose.

http://countocram.com/2024/03/07/e3w4ldv We found that our robot, like many, was having trouble getting up the first incline, especially without tipping over. Occasionally, we would be able to cross over the first bar by driving the robot straight into it, but it was too unreliable to depend on. However, the team improvised and attached a piece of sheet metal to the front of the bot to push balls and cubes around on the field. This allowed the team to score some points but raised the problem of not being able to make it up the mountain. This was easily solved by having the robot go backward up the ramp instead of forward, so the sheet metal didn’t hit the ground. When combined with good preliminary alliance partners, these improvised design ideas allowed us to qualify for the finals round. Because the third team in line was picked to be a finals alliance partner, we were made an alliance captain. We chose the other Oakville team (9612) as well as team 8782.

As time went on we began to notice that many teams were using treads, with varying degrees of success. From what we observed, other teams also used wheels, but to a lesser extent. The specific choice of wheels also tended to be larger than our own. On the field, one of the other teams skipped the bars and parking zones altogether by using an extending arm. With everything we observed at the qualifier, we decided that treads were useful for our plan of climbing the mountain, and plan to implement them in our robot’s design.

Stay tuned for an update from our other team.