The school’s robotics team has recently returned from the First Robotics Competition Florida Regional after a decent performance in this year’s challenge: “Crescendo”.
In the qualifying stage, the team ended up 24th amongst 61 teams. Still, it failed to get into the playoff stage as they could not get one of the top teams to choose them as their alliance member, which is the main criterion to advance further in the competition.
“Overall I think we did ok, we ended up in the top half while having a lot less financial resources than other teams, but all of us were sort of disappointed we didn’t make it to the playoffs,” Nicolas Henao, a member of the robotics team and student at TCS said.
On the other hand, other team members are more positive, believing that the team’s performance at the regional was great and that all the work leading up to it was as good as it could be.
“The team designed the robot really well, used materials that were really good, the robot was very well programmed, it did everything that it had to do,” Julian Zuñiga, the robotics team mentor and a teacher at TCS said.
Additionally, the team’s performance in terms of build quality was a lot better than in past competitions, in which it was common for the team to have to rebuild large parts of the robot after every match.
“Team performance was very stable, for the very first time we didn’t have to go to the repair station after every single match,” Zuñiga said.
On the other hand, while the robot’s main components were very stable, the electronics didn’t perform as well, leading to the robot being temporarily paralyzed several times across the competition.
“We got disconnected in one of the matches and we need to work on how to make the electronics more stable during every single match,” Henao said.
Besides the wiring issues, the team didn’t always have synergy when it came to programming and positioning the robot, leaving the first 15 seconds of every match, where no human input is allowed and the robot works exclusively off of pre-programmed instructions, in jeopardy.
“There were some miscommunication issues between the people who programmed the robot and the ones who were driving it, so the autonomous didn’t always work as expected. This is something that could really be improved for next year,” Henao said.
Besides communication, some in the team believe that a crucial way to improve the team is to work more on new technologies during the off-season as well as nitpicking the little details to improve movements.
“Work more during the off-season work on things that have to do with programming and improve all the timings, the cycles, and we could use some other subsystems,” Zuñiga said.