The Mt. Sac society of physics students mentored a team to the Small Manufacturers association Vex Robotics competition. Here is a picture of the team:
Not pictured are advisors Ben Chu and Profmason.
The competition is supposed to run five rounds with the best win/loss and point ratio being ranked into the top eight at the end of the competition. This competition had 46 teams! This meant there were approximately 250 people actively competing! The large number of competitors made it difficult for the event organizers, but the did a great job of keeping the event moving and organized.
Each round consists of four robots in two teams of two. The round starts with a twenty second autonomous navigation period, is scored and then there is a two minute remote control period. Rules for the competition are available here.
Here you can seem Team Wacbot with their alliance partners. Their alliance partners was one of several all girl teams mentored by the Girl Scouts of America. I can barely wait to sign my daughter up for girl scouts!
Unfortuately, during the autonomous navigation round, WacBot got caught up on a ring and wasn’t responding to controls. It spent the entire round sitting stuck on the ring.
The students did a terrific job of problem solving and ended up tearing out, rebuilding and reinstalling the stripped motor in less then twenty minutes! The students decided to make some substantial design changes to the robot to prevent this problem from happening again!
Unfortunately their chief programmer didn’t make it to the competition. (He had been up all night the night before coding the autonomous mode!) The vex control box with the program installed had stopped responding on two channels. The students swapped in a different control box, but this lacked the autonomous programming.
After the modifcations, Wacbot was hot! With Kevin driving they racked up ring after ring on the high tower, setting the competition record for rings on the high tower! They triumphed their next two rounds and ended up in 9th place out of a field of 46!
Then they were struck by disaster again. The arm pivot had been doing such yeoman work hoisting rings that it stripped out in the middle of a match! The students tore the pivot mechanism apart and rebuilt it.
They finished the rebuild and rushed to the competition stand. Then they found out that the last rounds had been canceled due to time constraints! The organizers had done their best, but there were so many teams that they couldn’t run five rounds.
Here is a picture of the winning robot in the individual rankings.
Despite being getting zero points the first round and loosing the arm in another round, the team still finished 27 out of a field of 46!
Here is a picture of a championship round to give you a feel for what the competition looks like. Four robots battling it out!
Overall the team did a terrific job, especially of diagnosing problems on the fly and finding appropriate solutions. This is a great competition and the organizers, Marty and Ralph from the Small Manufacturers Association deserve major Kudos for putting on an event that inspires so much creativity, ingenuity and hard work!
Team WacBot is hoping to get a spot in the finals at Cal State Northridge in December!