Peak Performance - 2018

On September 8th, we went to one of two of our annual off-season events - Peak Performance! It was quite the event, so there is a lot to unpack:

Connection Issues Galore!

Just like in the competition season, we had more than a couple of connection issues when out on the field. Our driver’s station failed to connect on multiple occasions, causing the event to be delayed, as the field technicians did their best to help solve the problem. We also had the issue of the router on our robot getting disconnected because of a hard collision against the wall, which left us disabled for the entire match. Thankfully, as the competition went on, the connection issues we seemed to have appeared less often.

Loss After Loss

Even though the team’s-connection issues were resolved, and our team performed very well (despite having rookie drivers), as well as climbing almost every match (even if it climbed in ways that it wasn’t built to), we still lost the majority of our matches. By the end of the qualifying rounds, we were in second to last place in the competition, 27th overall.

Alliance Selection & Finals

While our chances of being picked looked grim, our overall individual performance during qualification rounds made us very appealing to the first seed alliance captain Team 3663 - Cedar Park Robotics, and their first pick team 1983 - Skunkwork Robotics. Our team was very overjoyed that we were picked despite our low ranking.

With our alliance, we made it to the Finals. But it wasn’t without difficulty. We had to play with only two robots against some very tough alliances. Team 1983’s intake arm broke during one of the quarter-final matches, so they were out of commission for three matches to fix it. Luckily, we won two of those three matches to move on to the finals without them. These victories made our day.

In finals, we went up against our toughest alliance yet. With 1983 back in action when we needed them most, we had some very close matches. We went on into a tiebreaker round which resulted, in a narrow victory for the other alliance.