2016 Season Wrap Up

  What a season! As a rookie team, we have overcome difficult challenges and achieved great success. At tournaments, everyone was proud to see their robot perform so well. A lot of other teams were impressed and came over to our pit to comment on our robot and congratulate us on our accomplishments. We worked hard to build our robot and team so it was great to receive the recognition.
  Everyone was excited at our first tournament in Battle Creek Lakeview. For majority of the team, it was their first tournament and they enjoyed watching other robots along with our robot compete. The first day of the competition was rough. The catapult was shooting inaccurately and the camera was misaligned so our driver couldn't aim his shots. We ended the day with a record of 4 - 4. On the second day, we were able to fix our catapult and camera before our matches and immediately saw great results. We won all of our remaining matches and rose to rank 6 from rank 23 and our record was 8 - 4. For the elimination matches, we were picked by the 4th captain - 4453 The Red Hot Chili Bots along with 1254 Tech Force. Together we beat the 5th alliance in a best 2 out of 3. We moved into the semi-finals where we faced the 1st alliance. We performed very well in the first match and won with a big leading score. However, our catapult broke and we could no longer shoot into the high goals. We unfortunately lost the next two matches and finished in the tournament as semi-finalists.
  Over the course of 2 weeks after the tournament, we worked tirelessly to improve our robot for the next competition. We created new autonomous sequences, implemented vision tracking, and added climbing capabilities to our robot. However, when we got to the tournament, the autonomous codes were not executing correctly and the climbing mechanism was not deploying correctly. In the middle of the day, the catapult's gear snapped and we couldn't use the catapult in two of our matches. Fortunately, a nearby company was able to weld the gear back together and the catapult was now functional. However, that solved only one of our problems. We ended at rank 19 in qualifications and was picked by the 7th alliance: 3572 Wavelength and 904 D Cubed. In the quarterfinals, we faced a very tough alliance who scored the current world record on us. We lost both matches and finished as quarter-finalists.
  In the end, we ranked 120th out of 411 teams in Michigan. Unfortunately, we missed going to the Michigan State Championship by 5 points. While we are all disappointed, we definitely had an exciting and memorable first year competing in FRC. We want to thank our sponsors and parents for their involvements and contributions. We wouldn't have achieve all of our accomplishments without you. We can't wait to compete again next year. GO ZOOBOTIX!