Competition Time!

Hi Everyone~

It's about time we give you an update! We have been busy at competitions with our robot!

For starters, here is a picture of our completed robot:

You can see the modified ball chute and the conveyor taking the basketball up to shooting position. We also had originally protected our robot with plexiglass all the way around, but due to weight restrictions, we had to go with netting instead. Bummer.

First, we arrive in Duluth, MN at 11:45pm on Wednesday, March 7th. We checked into our hotel and crashed for the night! Getting up at 6am, we eagerly ate breakfast and got to unloading our robot (AKA Admiral Akbar) and gear. Thursday was an all-practice day, Friday was actual competitions and Saturday was finals.

Here are some pictures from the Duluth competition:
Here you can see the layout of the playing field:

And the three platforms in the middle that, if we can manage to balance our robot on, we get extra points during a match:

And here is our team in red, standing behind the plexiglass to control the robot with joysticks:

During our practice time, we were having technical difficulties when we could not the robot to communicate with our laptop and a couple of the judges came out to assist us. This would only happen on a practice day--they are not allowed to help us once the competition starts!

Uriah lines up the robot for a perfect shot:

And here is a pic of the entire field during a competition:

And let's not forget our mascots: The Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots! Everybody loves our mascots and lots of people asked to pose with our guys:

Here, they are kicking the snot out of an uncooperative team member (Adam):

(just kidding)

And here our Rock 'Em Sock 'Em mascots duke it out:

Overall, Duluth proved to be a very challenging competition for us. With many technical difficulties such as communication problems, bad drive motors and wheels not gripping, we struggled but learned a lot. After a lot of heated arguments and some productive brainstorming, we managed to place 59th out of 64 teams.

Fortunately, the Milwaukee competition went much better! Stay tuned!

~Mason and Cassidy