Not every event we go to ends well for us, we're only human after all. But it's important that we document our failures along with our success for not only we, but others, can learn from our mistakes.
Our team was founded in 2013, after a dispute regarding the roles of mentors and coaches in the design process, leading to a handful of team members to leave and form one of their own, The Axis of Innovation. We still stand by the minimal roles of coaches and mentors in the design, build, and rpogramming processes, meaning that the majority of these tasks are done solely by the members themselves, allowing for members to actually think and learn without a guiding hand, for the most part.
We also have very little funding (for a robotics team at least) despite the numerous sponsors we have, which forces us to buy only the parts we can afford and improvise with what we already have.
2016 marked First Tech Challenge's first implementation a league play system instead of a qualifier. This new system would involve teams going to many qualifying competitions--whose results would be compiled--instead of just one. Eager to try out the new system, we joined Emerald League. Our league matches started out fairly poor, but the frequent competitions gave us both incentive and inspiration for improvement. Many of our mechanisms in the past have been mostly untested when we got to our competitions. This year, we began similarly, but the abundance of competitions allowed us ample time to improve. Our performances increased in quality, until we were the #1 team at several of our final league matches.
By the time the league championship rolled around, we were the #2 overall team. Our design had been redone and refined greatly throughout the process of league play. We did just as well as expected--if not better--at this final qualifying competition. We not only won the match, but we were the captain of our winning alliance. In addition to the game award, we also received the Rockwell-Collins Innovate Award for creating an Android app that allows for variables to be configured to a different value without having to wait for a recompilation the code. This is especially useful for autonomous as there are several values that must be dead-reckoned (move distance) or changed last minute (wait time before starting).
Our success in league play led us to be over-ambitious for our robot at the regional competition. We completely redid the design of the robot into what we believed would be more effective and efficient in scoring points. Unfortunately, we simply did not have the time between the competitions to work out all of the details of the design. After working with it extensively nearly every night that we could, we realized the night before the competition that there simply too many design flaws that prevented the robot from operating as intended. We then had to quickly reconstruct our old robot, which we knew would at least work better than our new attempt. This reconstruction was hastly done, leaving much of the robot not sufficiently tightened or structurally sound. At the competition, this--to everyone's disappointment--led to our robot actually performing far worse than at our league championship. We did not win a single award, and, for the first time in the history of the team, did not move on to Super-Regional.
After getting off to a late start (problems with registering our team and lack of good work ethic), our design was rushed, flawed, and under developed, causing us to have an abysmal performance at our qualifier. We did not win a single match, and our design was beyond improvement during the course of the event. Despite our awful performance on the field, we won the Connect Award for our outreach program to Mexico, which allowed us, thankfully, to continue our season and move onto the regional event at UTA.
With only a few weeks between the Qualifier and Regional, we attempted a redesign of the robot; however, we fell short and were not able to get a fully redone design with time for programming, so we had to settle for improving our previous design and hope for the best. We did end up winning a few matches; however, we did not come close to moving on without an award. Once again, we won the Connect Award for our outreach program, which, by this event, had been carried out better than we had expected, even getting the team into contact with the FLL coordinator for more help with starting a team the next season.
After our miserable failures game-wise in the past two competitions, we had done a complete redesign before this event: an awesome new wheelbase, allowing us to turn on a dime; a new lifting mechanism, the four-bar lift, which was complimented by many other teams, as many had never seen one used on an FTC robot before; and scoop with a trapdoor for releasing the balls. However, we had spent far too much time designing the wheelbase and lift and not enough on the scoop itself, which performed atrociously during the matches, while the entire rest of the robot functioned beautifully.
Even though the scoop was essentially a lost cause, we never gave up on it. We improved it as much as we possibly could in between the matches; however, the best improvement came right before the final game, a locking mechanism to keep balls inside the scoop. This improvement allowed us to actually hold balls and still scoop up more without losing any of the ones we had, which led to our last match being a much needed victory.
This was our very first competition as a new team, and we performed anyone would expect a rookie team to perform. Poorly. We didn't win a single match in the entire competition, partly due to technical problems — a lack of sufficient time to program the robot correctly — and partly to construction problems, thankfully our driver did pretty well, considering these difficulties. Thankfully, though, we didn't place dead last in the entire competition.
Not only did we not move on from this qualifier, but the team from which we had splintered won the first place Inspire for their design, which was just salt in the wound. However, we could not just give up, the team quickly rebounded and got the necessary funds to attend another qualifier at Central Texas College, with a quick redesign and more time for programming.
At this qualifier in Killeen, Texas, we won every qualifying match, save one due to technical difficulties with the WiFi connection between the Field Control System and the robot's Samantha Module. Because of the skill of the drivers and the performance of the robot, the number one team, Cold Steel, who had not lost a single match, picked us as their alliance member for the semi-finals.
In the semi-finals, the alliance between The Axis of Innovation and Cold Steel held tight and won every match, moving both teams on onto the UTA Regional. However, ontop of this The Axis of Innovation went on to win the Inspire Award, the most prestigious award a team can win at a FIRST Tech Challenge tournament.
At the regional in Arlington, Texas, The Axis of Innovation placed in the top ten in the the qualifying matches; however, this was not enough to place them into the semifinals, and no team chosen them as their alliance member, so the team was heartbroken as it appeared that they were not going to be moving on past this point. However, the team won first place Inspire award yet again, moving the rookie team onto the Super Regional.
At the first ever Super Regional, The Axis of Innovation did not do too well at the Super Regional. The team was facing many technical difficulties, including a disfunctional autonomous program and a disconnecting battery. Despite these challenges, The Axis of Innovation placed about midway in their brackets, placing about 35th out of 72 teams. Not bad for a rookie team!