I’ve talked about our new laser cutter in the past and I have a fun update, on Thursday this past week we finally managed to fire it for the first time! We haven’t done enough testing to see what tolerances we can hold but so far its looking good!

On To Kick Off!

Our team started the day off with watching the kick off broadcast. I’m surprised that Dean only spoke for a few minutes. Also kick off just doesn’t quiet feel the same with out Woodie. Next we broke out into small groups ~6 students and a mentor to read the game manual. After we finished reading the game manual each group presented rules that they thought were important.

General robot constraints remained mostly the same, <125lbs <120″ frame perimeter, <16″ extension past frame perimeter. A few interesting rules, G405 No catching cargo, and G209 No buddy climb.

After the rules presentation we had everybody complete the rules quiz provided by 1678, in order to move onto the next step they had to score minimum 35/40 on the test. After the rules test each group spent 10 minutes making a list of all the possible ways to score and gain ranking points. Then each group presented their list to the team.

• Taxi 2 points
• Upper Hub 2 points
• Lower Hub 1 points
• Low Rung 4 points
• Mid Rung 6 points
• High Rung 10 points
• Traversal Rung 15 points
• Foul 4 points
• Tech foul 8 points

Both upper and lower hub points are doubled during auto. In addition to points another repeated theme present once again this year is ranking points. There are four ways for a team to earn ranking points. A team’s qualification ranking is determined by ranking points first, then average match points, and a few more tie breakers with a random sort if there is still a tie after 4 sorts.

• Winning 2 points
• Tie 1 point
• Cargo Bonus 1 point (20 alliance colored cargo scored in hub, 18 if quintet scored in auto)
• Hangar Bonus 1 point (Alliance has 16 hangar points)

It seems that first has decided to limit the number of ranking points that a team can guarantee themselves this year. Its impossible for a team to get 16 hangar points by themselves. Scoring 20, or 18 + 5 cargo in auto is a task that 95% of teams are not able to do by themselves.

After our team talked about the different ways we can score we broke out into groups and attempted to put numbers to the ways to score. We made different guesses for accuracy, time to complete and cycles per match in an attempt to find the best way to play Rapid React.

Our team came to two ideas being present, scoring high in the hub with a middle climb and a scoring in the low hub with a high climb(maybe traversal climb). The team was about 70% in favor of scoring in the high hub.

After our scoring analysis our team stayed as a group to come up with a ranked priority list for high hub scoring and a middle climb(Pictured below). We have another meeting on Sunday where we will start looking at different ways to complete the items in the priority list.