All of the long weeks spent preparing, designing, manufacturing, assembling and testing our bots have finally paid off, as Team Boss managed to come out on top at our final Slotbots competition!
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| Left to Right - Sean Hadley, Tyler Brown, Patrick Hopps, Casey Boyle, Mark Gordon (Graduate Student Instructor) |
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| Award from Harris Corporation |
The final competition was quite intense, but went great for our team. Some moments really challenged how well we could perform under stress (such as the precision needed to properly set up our machine during competition rounds), and other moments we felt confident, relaxed, and in control of the match. However, once our ramming module locked the lever in our favor (which luckily it successfully did for every round), we knew we could relax a little, since the match had essentially just changed from a full-arena battle to only a duel between top bots.
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| Assembly of top bot driving components |
Overall we maintained a strong presence, but were challenged in unique ways due to the diversity of competition. Some teams had massive top bots, whereas others had bots with spring-loaded or gravity-driven arms which challenged our ramming bot in the slot. There were also times where a simple mishap could potentially have cost us a match, such as improperly setting-up our Slotbot, having a wheel of our top bot get stuck in the slot, using a malfunctioning control system, and much more.
Although we completed our Slotbot about a week ago, we spent a great deal of time improving and modifying our bots during the days up until our competition. The top bot underwent quite a few improvements, including a new, larger ball-gathering hoop mechanism (with cooler-looking black beads), enhanced set screws in the wheels, rewiring and soldering to improve connections, and more. One cool feature is that we mounted a small electrical connector to the bottom of the top bot, which allows the top bot to disconnect from the ramming bot simply by driving away and breaking the connection. Once a match begins, we immediately deploy the ramming arm, and then disconnect and focus only on driving the top bot in competition. The ramming bot needed minimal improvements.
Once our machine was fully enhanced and completed, we competed in our seeding round, to determine our initial rank in the tournament brackets prior to the competition. This seeding round was a single match with no opponent, and the more balls gathered results in a higher seed. We managed to score quite a large number of points in our seeding round, resulting in the highest seed.
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| Seeding round for competition - both bots ready on top and in slot |
