Over the weekend of March 12 and 13, Warren G. Harding’s Robotics team, Team 48 Delphi E.L.I.T.E., traveled to Pittsburgh for its first competition of the season.
Team 48 finished with a 6-4-0 record and the No. 9 seed out of 39 teams during qualifying rounds. During alliance selections, 48 moved up to the No. 8 seed and accepted an invitation to join the No. 2 alliance, which consisted of Team 1507 out of Lockport, N.Y. and Team 1541 out of Midlothian, Va. Coincidentally, Team 1507 is another Delphi-sponsored team.
Team 48 and their alliance made it all the way to the finals, earning the Finalist Award, losing to the No. 1 alliance in two matches, thereby giving Harding an overall second-place finish.
Team 48 is now in continuous improvement mode and will spend the next two-and-a-half weeks upgrading its minibot, adding autonomous mode, and using its practice robot for drive team practice with the intent to improve tube pickup and scoring efficiency ahead of the next events. Team 48 will next compete at the Smoky Mountain Regional in Knoxville, Tenn., from March 31 to April 2.
This year's theme is Logo Motion, which is played by two competing alliances on a flat 27-foot by 54-foot field. Each alliance consists of three robots. They compete to hang as many inflated plastic shapes (triangles, circles, and squares) on their grids as they can during a 2 minute and 15 second match. The higher the teams hang their game pieces on their scoring grid, the more points their alliance receives.
The match begins with one 15-second autonomous period in which robots operate independently of driver inputs and must hang Ubertubes to score extra points. For the rest of the match, drivers control robots and try to maximize their alliance score by hanging as many logo pieces as possible. Any logo piece hung on the same peg as an Ubertube receives double points.
The match ends with robots deploying minibots, small electro-mechanical assemblies that are independent of the host robot, onto vertical poles. The minibots race to the top of the pole to trigger a sensor and earn additional bonus points.
