VEX Robotics Competition 2/16/2019

Our team competed in the VEX Robotics Competition held at Germana Community College's Daniel Technology Center in Culpeper, VA. Similar to our first competition, this was included a mix of middle school and high school teams. We participated in six qualifying matches before moving on to the elimination rounds. We ended the tournament ranking 4th out of 23 teams with 5 wins, 1 loss, and 0 ties. We also won the Design Award for our team's engineering notebook.

Our robot for this competition was entirely new and differed drastically from our previous robot. Our first robot's chassis ran on 4 traction wheels, whereas this one ran on 4 omni-directional wheels. This allowed the robot to travel more smoothly on the playing field and turn with increased ease. Instead of having a flywheel to shoot balls, we implemented a piston ball shooter that works by using a slip gear. We also changed our ball intake system and added a funnel to direct the ball's path into the shooter. Although our previous robot had a six-bar lift and a claw to hold and flip caps, we did not include any robotic arm on this robot. We decided to focus on other tasks like shooting balls to toggle flags that would yield the same amount of points as placing caps on poles.

In totality, our performance at this competition was immensely better than that at our first competition. Our robot's design had improved significantly, allowing us to be better competitors in matches, although we still have much room for improvement. This competition was a good representation of our growth as a team and how we have been adapting and inheriting new designs for our robot and trying various approaches to scoring points.