I participated in volunteering for 16 hours at the VRC VTO middle school competition. I was a participant in the competition that was 1 day before this one, the high school group national championship. I decided to stay two more days in Hsinchu to participate in volunteering.
I was assigned the job as a field reset in the main tournament field. I found it interesting since I could watch the tournament from a very close angle, a view that only staff and referees can enjoy. Two other volunteers helped with resetting the field. Our job was to place the triballs in the correct position and count if any ball is missing.
Even though I got to enjoy the view of competitions, I still felt tired after working 8 hours a day. It was a very memorable experience. I got to talk and meet a lot of people and witness some amazing scores teams had accomplished.
Taiwan Open, the national competition that has world qualifying awards, is the one I will be introducing. This is the second to the last competition we will attend in Taiwan this season, and is especially important since there is three spots to qualify for worlds.
The excellence award, and two teams on the tournament champion alliance. These are what we are aiming for in this competition. Also, if one team got two of the world qualifying awards, the eligibility will be passed down to the skills ranking. That is why skills challenges are also very important.
We continued to improve the robot we used for the previous competition, PAS signature event. After analyzing and organizing our time after PAS, we think that we don't have enough time to reconstruct a robot and also fully practice using it.
The competition is separated into two days. First day morning is all about skills challenge and driver's meeting. While the qualification matches starts in the afternoon. On the second day, the qualification matches will end around noon, and the final matches will start. Most likely after day 1, teams will be able to know if we have a chance to get qualified for worlds.
In our first day of competition, we did good and won all qualification matches while obtaining the AWP points, placing us at rank 1 in qualification. We got a score of 168 in driver skills and 124 in autonomous at the end of the day. The judges also interviewed us for the judging process.
At that rate, what we have to do is to continue scoring high in qualification and get a higher score in autonomous skills. There is also a possibility that the judges will come again to interview us for the second time.
I spent some time at night improving our programming skills route and strategy. I also added some fool proof program to prevent the robot from getting stuck.
We ended up ranking 2nd in qualifications and 4th in skills. We weren't able to score high in autonomous mainly because me and another teammate didn't perform well in skills match loading. However, our driver skills score broke our own record with 184 points. The judges also came to ask some questions regarding our robot.
In finals, we selected 66994A as our alliance partner, and we got tournament champion. This means we are qualified for worlds!!!! I am surprised yet delighted that we are able to go to world championship in our first year of competition, and I will try to do my best to prepare for worlds.
For this blog, I will be sharing about the competition I and my team attended, the PAS VEX Signature Event. This competition is the first one our team participated in that has world qualifying awards. The teams that got the excellence award or the tournament champion get a ticket to VEX Worlds.
Continuing from our last competition in AST, we decided to construct a new robot that could solve the problems of the old one. However, we were in a rush, since there were only 3 weeks before this competition, and we only had a chassis constructed.
The part we modified the most was the shooter mechanism, we changed from a catapult system to a flywheel system. Mainly because we want to be able to shoot out triballs from the back of our robot. We made the middle of the robot hallow, for the triballs to pass through.
In the current robot, we utilized a special feature of the triball design. Triballs are designed to be a reuleaux triangle, which, when the triangle passes through two parallel surfaces, will act and spin like a circle. With this idea in mind, we made the tunnel's top, bottom, and sides all into flat surfaces, so the triball can spin freely while flying out.
The robot's completeness and practice proficiency were both not very perfect. I personally think the completeness of the preparation for this competition is not really enough. However, we didn't have much time for improvements either.
The PAS signature event is split into three days of competition. The first day mainly focuses on practice matches and skills attempts, which is relatively an easier day. The second day starts with the real qualification matches and rankings, with a tight schedule. The third day has some qualification matches in the morning, and final matches in the afternoon.
We aimed for skills during the first day, because this is the time when we have the most free time to do so. The main problem we met was not being able to reach a stable score in our skills because our match loading was not good enough. At the end of the day, we reached rank 5 skills, with 163 in driver, and 79 in autonomous.
During the second day, our main objective was to rank as high as possible in qualification rankings. We reached rank 32 out of 57 teams which wasn't an ideal score for us. The main problem was that the driver wasn't completely familiar with the new robot, so we got stuck sometimes and didn't take full advantage of the robot.
Excellence award, the top award that can get you into the world championship, requires your team to rank in 30% of the qualification ranking. In this competition, we have to rank higher than 17 so we can at least be the excellence award candidate. This is why the last few qualification matches on day 3 are very important to us.
We won the first qualification match but lost the rest on day 3. Our alliance team had an overheated chassis during the match and couldn't move. I think we will also have to check our alliance partner's robot state during pre-match communications.
Our qualification ranking was 23 at last, excluding us from the excellence award. The only hope left is to get the tournament champion during the finals.
We paired up with 66994P as our alliance since we were a great match in the AST league. We ended up losing in the semi-finals because both of our teams weren't able to do the elevation mission successfully.
At the end of the three-day journey, we are awarded the Think Award. Ranked 3rd in skills, with 163 in driver skills and 140 in autonomous skills. Ranked 23 in qualification matches, and stopped at semi-finals.
I think this is quite an interesting journey. One thing I have learned throughout the whole preparation process and the competition is that not every time the effort put into the competition will give you the expected outcome. Even though I spent the whole 3 weeks preparing for the competition, trying to evaluate the best state before the competition, sometimes the preparation and time might still not be enough for us.
The competition journey is very valuable. Until the next competition, I will do my best to improve our robot design and tournament strategies. Hopefully, we can get the ticket for the world championship in our next competition. See you next time :)
This is the first competition me and my team attended in this year's VRC OverUnder season. Unlike regular competition that is continuous, this a a league competition, in which the competition is split into a total of 4 weeks. The competition will be played on Sunday.
The first 3 weeks will be qualification matches and skills matches, while teams can choose to either participate in all 3 weeks or only 2 of them. Every team gets 6 skill attempts during every week of competition. The final skills ranking will be the best total score out of 3 weeks. The last 1 week will be the final matches with no skills matches.
This competition has no qualifying awards, but it is still very important since this is our very first competition of the season. It will be best if we start to familiarize ourselves with how competition goes.
Each team will compete in 6 qualification matches every first 3 weeks. The final qualification rankings will be ranked in the order of the average of Win Points earned. That is why performing stably is very important.
In our first week of competition, October 29th, we won 5 matches out of 6 and ranked 4th in qualification rankings. It was a smooth start, but most of the time we won with a little luck. I wouldn't consider this as a stable win.
In our second week of competition, November 12th, we won 5 matches out of 6 again, ranked 2nd in qualification rankings. This time, I can say that we had a really stable performance compared to last week. All our strategies were more complete and we are all more familiar with how the competition goes.
At the end of the qualification weeks, we ranked 2nd in qualification and ranked 4th in skills ranking. We have a score of 131 in driver skills, and 110 in autonomous skills. Ranking 2nd in qualification means that we get to select an alliance for our final matches.
During the last week of preparation, we prepared different autonomous routes for the finals, since the objective is slightly different from the qualification matches. We paired up with team 66994P, which is also from our organization. Lastly, we won the tournament champion together, with our strategies.
Our team won the judges award, and the tournament champion award together with team 66994P. This was an quite unexpected result for us, it is unbelievable that we won the tournament championship in our very first VRC competition.
I think the results after this competition taught me that we are currently moving on the right path in designing our robot and strategizing. Our next competition is the PAS signature event, with world championship qualifying awards, so we have to improve more and try to do our best!
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