By: Charles "Chuckles" Bao
Between San Diego and Aerospace, we made a couple improvements to our robot. We added small fingers with compliant wheels to help hold the cubes in our intake. At San Diego, we had lots of issues with our robot dropping cubes and this fix helped allow us to keep cubes in our intake. We also learned that the forks that we used at San Diego were simply not good enough. We added a pull-up mechanism that would use a motor to pull 2 strings attached to the forks and tilt the forks inward in order to prevent robot from falling off our forks.
During our qualification matches, we won and lost some. We struggled with small issues here and there but were able to squeeze ourselves into 15th seed. We were picked by team 597: The Wolverines and selected team 5124: West Torrance Robotics to join our alliance.
During our quarterfinal matches, we played the 5th seed alliance. We were able to keep the scores close but eventually we were unable to pull off any wins. We ended our Aerospace Valley Regional 0-2 in the quarterfinals.
Unfortunately, we did not win the event and didn't qualify for the world championship in Houston. However, we are extremely proud of our accomplishments this season and are happy with how our team has grown this season. We hope to improve and come back next season as a better team.