FIRST Robotics Canadian final: Day three! Competition day.
by Adelaide Z | April 2, 2011The day started off with the conclusion of the qualification rounds before lunch and the main event which began at 1:00. As the previous day, the team decided that with the difficulties we had with our arm (although functional and still capable of scoring at the highest level) and with the lack of a mini-bot deployment system, that we would stick to defensive play.
Some Vigilant colleagues arrived minutes before we hit the field in our final qualification round. Unfortunately, we had a problem with the battery and the robot was lacking power despite a full charge. This was disappointing for the lack of performance as well as it being what we we're certain was going to be the only opportunity to show off our bot to the 'Vigilant brass'. But to our surprise and great excitement, we made it to the quarter finals. The team immediately got to work on tweaking what we could. By this point there wasn't much we could do that hadn't been done the two previous days, but we decided that as we weren't using out bot to score we would disconnect all electronics for the lift and arm systems in an effort to maximize the potential of our battery.
Our bot was paired with two relatively strong bots which were happy to have us as a defender. Our robo-trio fought our way through the quarter undefeated and moved on to the semi-finals with great excitement.
In the semi-finals our trio was up against a team lead by bot 2051, undisputed best bot in our division run by a team with many years of experience and several regional championships under their belt. We focused on blocking this bot in particular, but their superior speed made this difficult at best and we lost the first round. Given this challenge ahead of us on the game field, we stripped as much of the lift system and arm and anything else that could be removed from our bot so as to lighten our load and give us a little extra speed. Unfortunately, 2051 was still a fair bit faster than we were and we weren’t able to match their speed and we were eliminated in round two.
This concluded Henri-Bourassa High School’s 2011 participation in the First Robotics competition. Still in good spirits for getting further than any other Quebec team, we packed up our robot, dismantled our pit and went out to celebrate.
Check out some video from the weekend:
For more videos, check out the Vigilant Futures YouTube channel.