Tower Takeover 2020 (Vex)
This was the first serious competition that I had entered with my school. We had a team of 8 or so people, I worked on the code, 3 people worked on the mechanics of the vehicle and 2 people worked on the report/journal we had to keep and also worked on the presentation. We also had 2-3 people who the teacher added to the team but didn't really do much except busywork. In the end though none of us stuck with just our jobs, all of us helped with coming up with ideas and building the vehicle. I still did the code mostly myself though, since nobody else on the team was experienced in that regard.
Moving on to the rules of the competition, the goal was to make a
robot that picks up and stacks 3 different colored cubes in your
teams goal zones, while also trying to place them high up in the
"towers". Placing a cube of a color in a tower increases the point
value of that cube in your stacks. On top of that, there is an
autonomous period at the start, the team scoring more points during
that period getting 6 bonus points at the end of the game. The pairs
were randomly selected before each match, and your team winning was
heavily dependent on both players doing well.
The first thing we did as a team was decide on what sort of robot to
make. After some brainstorming we decided to make a standard robot
with 2 grabber "arms" that also pulled up blocks into a tray.
Unfortunately since both the school ordered the parts late, AND the
parts took longer to arrive than usual, we ended up being very
behind schedule. Once we got what we needed though, I started
working on the control code while the others were starting to build
it. I made the autonomous code next, which was supposed to go
forward, take some cubes, then turn to our goal zone and release
said cubes. After I was done personally, I couldn't really test the
vehicle because it wasn't done yet. For this reason, I ended up
helping the rest of the team by working on the tray, and making a
replica of the first grabber that was already made so we had 2 of
them. Our tray ended up not being very big, but it could still fit 5
or so cubes in it. After 2-3 weeks of working on the project, we
were done. The arms ended up slightly too far apart and would drop
cubes frequently but we had no more time to improve it and it was
hopefully good enough to at least let us pass a
few rounds.
When the day of the competition arrived, we were feeling pretty
confident, especially after watching a few of the matches before us,
which didn't do very well. Unfortunately we were extremely unlucky
during the actual competition. First of all, there was a problem
with the programming language we had to use to program the robot.
There were 2 parts of the script we could edit, the autonomous
function and the main function. These were activated automatically
during the competition, via cables connected to our controllers.
However, the code would randomly get stuck at the autonomous
function and lock it from any other further control. The problem
ended up being a bug that would prevent the rest of the code from
running after it, that never showed up during testing, only during
the competition. Luckily we fixed it later on, but it was too late
since we lost 2-3 games beforehand. So basically 2 of the games we
played that day we were just completely immobile while the other
teams we were with desperately tried to do their best. In a
different match, our driver got one of our wheels stuck in a goal
zone, which also made us unable to move, and in another different
match one of our motors just stopped working. We were also unlucky
with the teams we were with/against. Most of our games, the teams we
were against had at least 1 good robot and the team we were with had
problems like ours, if not worse.
Despite all the problems we faced, we still did decently well in the
end, and it was still a great experience to compete in a really
serious competition like VEX. I feel like this helped me improve
with my teamwork skills and my skills working under a slim time
frame.