SkillsUSA

Apart from FIRST robotics, I compete in a SkillsUSA competition called Mobile Robotics Technology. We compete in these competitions with 2 man teams, and my partner was Sanjai Bashyam. Sanjai and I have both worked together on robot-related things for 3 years, and have been good friends since 4th grade. I find that the communication between us is extremely effective and efficient, and I wish we could model this relationship with all members of the club.

Anyway, SkillsUSA is unfortunately at the same time as FIRST, and we always elect to prioritize FIRST over Skills. For this reason, we are always on a time crunch, and are never expected to perform well. However, this year went a lot better than we expected it to. We got 1st place at Districts, and then went on to get 3rd at the State Level!

Alamo Regional

So, we recently competed in the Alamo Regional! Here is how things went down :
In FIRST, every round consists of a 3v3 match up, with teams randomly selected. The winning team gets a certain number of ranking points, and the losing team gets none. Which means that no matter how good your robot is, you would still get 0 ranking points if your teammates sucked.Our ranking score was very low because our teammates were mostly rookies or subpar robots, despite our team having a good robot.

When elimination rounds start, the teams with the most ranking points become team captains, and choose teams to make their alliance of 3. So for a robot like us, we wouldn’t be captains, but we would be chosen because we were one of the best robots there.

HOWEVER, on the last day, we found out to our dismay that the processor in our cRIO(The brain of our robot), was faulty and had loose bits. So during the final rounds before elims, our robot couldn’t move. So all the teams in the stands looking for robots to choose, saw us as a robot that couldn’t move. So no one picked us. Also, we got a new cRIO right before elims started, so we work working elims started.

Our robot can consistently score about 30 points by itself. 95% of the elimination rounds had total scores of each team below 30. We could have easily turned all of those matches around, and placed really highly in the tournament, possibly qualifying for internationals in St. Louis.
This was really a depressing moment. Easily the best robot this club has made, the best drive team we have ever had, and yet, probably the worst performance at a regional. Due to a lack of funding, this was the only regional we competed in, and thus ended our season.