After a long week in St. Louis at the 2014 FIRST World Championships, the team has finally arrived home. The entire event was an overall great success as it was one of the better organized championships we have been to. With 400 FRC teams there to compete in 4 divisions (Archimedes, Galileo, Curie, and Newton) we were directly competing against 99 other teams throughout the competition.
We were lucky enough to end up with a record of 8-2-0 (W-L-T) after qualification matches which placed us 7th in our division! For the first time in the history of our team, we would be playing after lunch on Saturday. We were alliance captains on the Galileo field! Upon selecting our alliance composing of FRC Teams 1023(Bedford Express), 225 (TechFire), and 217 (The Thunder Chickens) we competed against the #2 seeded alliance. We were unfortunately knocked out in the quarter finals, but what an experience it was. Thank you to all three teams for helping us make our first Championship Eliminations debut!
Even though we had been knocked out of the robot competition, that does not mean the event was over for us. We still had the opportunity to win one of the Galileo division awards. We had multiple judges stop by our pits throughout the competition, but we never expected to be awarded the prestigious Excellence in Engineering Award! It seems the judges liked one of our more secretive aspects of our 2014 Aerial Assist robot, our brake / stabilization system (more info to come). The Excellence in Engineering Award (sponsored by Delphi)celebrates an elegant and advantageous machine feature, we are very proud to have been awarded with this achievement at a Championship level.
Overall it was a great experience and we would not change a thing. We as a team are extremely proud with how this championship tournament turned out! We look forward to seeing everyone again in the 2015 FIRST season!