This past week (4/24 – 4/25) The RoboBees attended the FIRST Championship in St. Louis.
After our great showing at the Chesapeake Regional, the team came home with a plan forward on how they wanted to progress forward to make the largest impact / have the robot perform at it’s peak during the qualification (and hopefully elimination) matches! A few small changes were made that boosted performance between the regional and championship that we hoped would let us slide right into elimination matches.
The team had decided to leave a day earlier than they have in the past so that the students could enjoy themselves in St. Louis instead of just living in the dome. On Wednesday morning the team split into two groups, one headed to the gateway arch while the other to the city museum. Both groups had a blast enjoying their respective locations, but unfortunately play time has to end when the competition starts. The pits opened at 5PM to provide a single practice match to verify communications with the field and allow teams to make final tweaks/repairs before qualification matches started Friday morning. The RoboBees were inspected and ready to go for their qualification matches by 7PM and spent the remainder of the evening preparing for the coming challenges.
Throughout the entire competition the team performed wonderfully and was selected to play in the Archimedes elimination matches with teams 234, 503, and 188. The alliance played wonderfully through quarterfinals winning back to back matches and proceeded onto semifinals. Unfortunately we had met our match and lost in the semifinals after 3 very tough matches. Overall, the team ended ranked 21st (out of the 76 in our division) with an average qual score of 119.60 and an average playoff score of 186.00.
The RoboBees would like to thank the rest of our alliance for the opportunity to play with them after lunch and look forward to the quickly (not fast enough!) approaching 2016 competition season. Go Bees!