On April 22.04.2023 and 23.04.2023 we went together with the Big Robot to the competition in Dresden. Enjoying our trip, there were some struggles at the beginning of the competition.
First Day (22.04.2023), we started at 9:00 a clock in the morning and worked till round about 1:00 p.m. nighttime. The first homologation went well, only for the basket we needed to add an emergency-stop button. The second homologation went not as expected, the bot drove like he should have, but our enemy detection didn’t work as expected, so we worked many hours to fix this. For the Big Bot on the other side, they managed to get through the dynamic homologation first try. Because of this problem we couldn’t help our Big Bot in the first few preliminary rounds. Eventually we fixed the problem with the help of another robotic member. After we then got our second homologation, we started working on a working tactic and managed to test our strategy together with the Big Bot in the preliminary rounds. Also, we got some problems with our gripper, because when the gripper opens over the Basket the height of our bot had gone up to 37 cm, but the maximum a bot was allowed was 35 cm, so we changed the angles and the position of the gripper.
Final day (23.04.2023), we started the day at 8:30 a.m.. At this point we only had 5 preliminary rounds left, where we could test the tactic and spot problems. In fact, we had to change many things in our enemy detection system, because our bot saw the opponent’s beacons, or the wall, as opponents and decided to stop. So, to stop this from happening we figured that it would be better to shut down our enemy detection in certain positions where no opponent could possibly be. After this easy fix our bot worked flawlessly. We also found out that we can preload cherries in our gripper which turned out to give us 7 extra gifted points, because as the rounds start, we would drop the cherries directly in the basket and then just continue our normal strategy. We got 3 perfect rounds of 83 points which was the second highest score in the whole competition after TURAG with 86 points.
FINALS:
First round vs. Bodensee RobotiX, this round has gone well for us, so we ended up winning 52 to 30, which is pretty good. In the semi-final against RCA, it went extremely good for us, because we did our fourth perfect round of 83 Point and won the match 83 to 56 which we were proud of. The final against the best team of Germany was played against TURAG as a best of three. We won the first round because TURAG’s enemy detection wouldn’t start which gave them a penalty of 50 Points, so the first round goes to us with 67 to (70-50 penalty points). The second round TURAG hadn’t problems with their enemy detection, so no penalty for them, that’s why we unfortunately lost round two 40 to 76. Our bot also had some problems with their beacon systems, so that’s why it stopped in the middle of the playing area. In the last round something terribly went wrong for us, because the Big Bot just stopped driving after the start, so we had no chance of winning this years‘ finals. Unfortunately, we lost the third round 25 to 82. We guessed it might have been a problem with our wheels, having too much dust glued to their surface.
Sadly, we didn’t win the whole competition, but we gathered a spot in France to represent Germany, which is an achievement itself and we can all be proud of ourselves. Actually, we didn‘t think of getting such a high score anyways, so thank you for your support.
(author: Lucian, Emanuel)