Results

Mock contest

The mock contest had a single elimination format. Our robot lost its secondbout to Team 27, Lego My Eggo with a score of eleven points to 27's XX, thehighest of the contest. During both rounds, our robot performed as expected,giving us confidence going into the qualifying round and inducing us to startthinking more about our plan to interfere with the other team's ability toscore.

Qualifying round

Our robot failed to orient properly and followed an incorrect path from thestart. As a side effect, an array overflowed, causing our board to crash, inturn causing our robot to emit IR past the end of the round - resulting inan automatic loss. While this lost was termed a 'disqualification', it was merely one elimination against us, leaving us one more loss away frombeing excluded from the remainder of the contest.

Properly humbled, we began extensive testing and introduced improvements insoftware and hardware. In our code, we added the capacity to move and confirmlocation using the black and white coloring on the board, and introduced several sanity checks, backup plans, and instances of 'squaring off' against the edge of the board for reliability and consistency. To our robot we addedball-capture rods to our plough, allowing our robot to score a second ball with much greater reliability, and light shields on our shaft-encoders, since we suspected that the different in the contest lecture hall had been a source of error. Finally, we added a routine at the end of our code by which our robot entered the other robot's side of the board, perturbing its balls and possibly blocking its path.

With the features added, our team began constant and exhaustive testing andincremental improvement. The last series of scoring tests at multiple orientations and block positions resulted in over 30 consecutive successes. After this, we charged our batteries and decorated our robot and it wasimpounded for the second round.

Second Round

Our robot began with the same error as in the qualifying round, but new, more robust software, detected this and corrected it. Our robot completed the rest of the round without a hitch, successfully scoring all five of our balls and moving the opponent's balls out of position.

Final Round

We arrived at 26-100 brimming with anticipation and occasionally hearing "fifty-eight" uttered as if it were the name of some dread predator-presumably by those who had seen our final testing. When our first round wasabout to begin, we entered the preparation and checked our robot, confident that our testing had prepared us for any contingency. Almost any contingency, we found, as we flipped the switch on our board and saw... nothing. Our batteries had failed completely, despite having been charged for several hours.In retrospect, we believe that the quick charge/drain cycles they suffered during testing had degraded their capacity to the point of near-uselessness.The organizers bought time for us as we transferred our sensors and motors toanother board, but in our haste we broke a soldering joint, and our contestcame to an abrupt, frustrating, and ironic end.

Concluding Haikus

Despite all efforts
Battery suckage triumphs
Fie, lucky whoresons!

Robot lost again
We are not bitter at all
But Paco Lopez?