The robot that I have been helping the Southwest High School Robotics Team build shipped today. This means that we are all done building it. Right. Actually there is very little that we will need to do once we arrive at the regional competition in Milwaukee.
(In case you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, check this out: Robots!)
This was a very busy week and weekend. We met every night except Wednesday during the week to work on the robot and we got a lot done (photos here).
On Saturday morning, we loaded up the robot into my pickup truck and drove it to Simley High School in Inver Grove Heights where they had a mockup of the arena in their lunchroom and they invited other teams to come have a practice competition. I think they had almost a dozen teams show up – including the team from Brainerd!
It was a really nice setup – the only thing that was missing was carpeting on the floor. Other than that it was a wonderful opportunity to test our robot.
It passed with flying colors!
We already knew we could pick up the ball, but could we do the other things we needed to do? So we put the robot in the arena and proceeded to do the four things we need to do. We knocked the ball off the overpass. We captured the ball and carried it around the track, we lifted the ball up and hurdled it over the overpass and we placed it on the overpass.
Man there were a bunch of happy kids after we did that!
The practice competition was a great idea. It gave all the teams a chance to practice their driving, debug their robots, and get a feel for what the other teams were doing. They actually staged a few sessions with six robots on the field so that it was like a real competition. It gets pretty crowded with six robots out there.
See photos of the practice competition at Simley High Schools here.
Sunday we rested. Actually I worked on my Mom’s house and did the grocery shopping. The kids met and worked on the robot from Noon until around 9:30.
On Monday morning we loaded the robot up again and went to another practice competition. This time it was at Egan High School. They also had a full arena setup but they had carpet on the floor, so it was more like the real arena.
We already knew we could do what we needed to, so we used this time to do more driver selection and practicing and also to debug the robot some more. We found a couple of weak areas and fixed them up.
Photos from the practice competition at Egan High School here.
After the practice session ended (they kicked us out at 7:00 – otherwise we would have stayed all night) we went to Mark’s house and tweaked the robot some more. Finally I called it quits around 9:30 and made the kids crate the robot up for shipping so we could go home.
The robot is now out of our hands until the regional competition in Milwaukee on March 13th-15th. When we arrive there will be stuff for us to do to it, but I think we are in pretty good shape.
