Category Archives: Championship

Championship, Skystone

NorCals 2020

In the beginning of March, ACME Robotics attended the Northern California Regional Championships with their sister team, ARES Robotics. This was the first time both teams would be attending the event together, so we were very excited!

NorCals is a competition between the 56 best teams in Northern California in San Jose. At the Championship, you compete for one of eight spots at the World Championship. It is a two day event, with judging and pit set up on the first day and matches, finals, and the award ceremony on the second day. Since ACME had been to Worlds the past two years, we were really just proud we had made it to NorCals and weren’t expecting to qualify for Worlds. 

Over the course of the weekend we had several highlights. Software and business judges came to talk to us after out judges presentation. We made repairs very quickly and managed to keep very positive attitudes. We won the majority of our qualification matches too, which was also good. 

We were not picked to be on an alliance for the finals. However, we did have a lot of fun watching the finals matches. 

Championship, Rover Ruckus

2019 Northern California Regionals

This past weekend, ACME Robotics attended the Northern California Regionals in San Jose, CA. Our goal was to qualify for the World Championship. After a long two days of judging, matches, and scouting, we were able to do just that. 

The Northern California Regionals span two days. 56 teams from the Northern California League, which spans from Bakersfield to the California – Oregon border, compete for eight spots of advancement to Worlds. These eight winners are the winning alliance (consisting of three teams), then 2nd place alliance captain, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place Inspire winners, and finally the Think award winner. That meant that we had to place high enough during the competition, or try to win Inspire or Think in order to qualify for the World Championship.

Judging and inspection began on Saturday and then match play on Sunday. Our judging presentation was at 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday. Our judging presentation went very well! Then, we went and set up our pit area and took the robot to inspection (which we passed). 

Sunday started bright and early with opening ceremonies and qualification matches. ACME played matches throughout the day and won 3 out 5 of them, placing us at 15th out of 28 teams in our division. During alliance selection we were picked to be on the third seed alliance. 

During elimination rounds we made it to our division finals. This meant we were playing against the first seed alliance. They ultimately beat us, but it was very fun to compete in the finals.

Since we had not qualified through match play, we need to win one of the awards I mentioned above. As each award passed, we became more and more discouraged as we hadn’t been nominated for any. Then they announced the Think winner – and it was ACME Robotics!

We were so excited and ran down the bleachers to high-five all of the tournament officials, referees, and judges. The Think award winner had a guaranteed spot at the World Championship and we couldn’t believe we had received it!

The Think award is given for a team’s engineering notebook. You may not know this, but we have to document our design process throughout the year in the engineering notebook. We use a typesetting system called LaTeX (pronounced la-tech) that allows us to  professionally format our engineering notebook. Throughout the notebook, we have entries written by every member on our team about our design process, fabricating parts, testing code, putting on outreach events, and everything in between. We include drawings, diagrams, pictures, and code into our notebook so that everything has a good visual representation. 

We were so honored to have been given the Think award and are already planning our pit for the World Championship. Worlds is held in Houston, Texas, and will be a week long affair from the 17-20 of April. In order to fund our way to Worlds we have set up a GoFundMe page where anyone can sponsor us. Here is the link: https://www.gofundme.com/acme-robotics-season-funding

Also, please click here if you would like to know how we did at Worlds last year and learn a little bit about it. 

As always, 

GO ACME!

Championship, Relic Recovery

ACME Robotics at the Houston World Championship

This past week the team attended our final competition of the season, Worlds. Now, like any sporting event,  the nationals or the worlds competition is for the best of the best in the sport, robotics is no different. Teams from China to Lebanon were in attendance of this week-long robotics event.

The Event

As I mentioned before, the championship was for teams all over the world. The championship also spanned almost the whole week and was for all levels of FIRST. The event took place in the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. FLL Jr., FLL, FTC, FRC, the Innovation Fair, Scholarship Row, and various other FIRST attractions were spread out all over the center.

The FTC championship was separated into two divisions, Franklin and Jemison. FIRST likes to name their divisions after famous people in science or history. Franklin was named after Benjamin Franklin and Jemison after the first African American woman to travel into space, Mae Jemison. Each division had their own matches until they had their division winner. Then the two divisions had a final match at Minute Maid Stadium, across the street from the convention center.

The pits were also a very fun place to be. Teams were each given space for a 10×10 pit. Our pit was made out of the same 8020 from Supers. We didn’t have any major changes to our pit besides keeping it a little more organized.

The Matches

After supers we decided not to make any major changes to the robot in an effort to allow the Software team to practice our autonomous routine. In fact the only changes we made to the robot were new intake blocks and an new design on the intake bar.

Each team competes in nine matches total. These matches were spread across two days. We had several good matches, but we were affected by connectivity issues. We had several great alliance partners and played some interesting matches. By the end of the matches we won 6 out of 9 of our matches.

Next was alliance selection. We did not get picked by the top seeded alliance, but it was good experience talking to the different teams.

Overall Experience

Our first overall experience at Worlds was a very good. We now know what we need to improve on for next year and we are already setting our goals. Now that we have had a taste of the higher competition levels in FIRST, we are looking forward to competing for a spot at Worlds next year.

Championship

Super Regionals 2018

The Western Super Regionals is a competition only for the best teams in states west of the Mississippi. Made up of 72 highly elite teams, the three days of competition are jam packed with matches, judging, pit time, fun and robots. The team spent weeks preparing for this major event. This year was the second year ACME had made it to Supers and we were trying everything in our power to reach our goal and make it to the Worlds Competition.

Supers was held this year in Spokane, Washington, at the Spokane Convention Center. This competition was much like the ones before, except bigger and longer. Normally teams are given a plastic table for a pit area, at Supers, the pit are ten by ten by ten. Meaning we had enough space for a pop up.

The match schedule also spanned across two days (Friday and Saturday). We had nine matches in total. We did pretty well during the matches, however we did have some slight problems with our REV hub, but the pit crew managed to fix it before our final match.

After the matches it was all about trying to be on an alliance for the finals. Two sister team, Revamped and Overcharged, seemed very interested in our three glyph autonomous routine on the back cryptobox, so we thought we had a pretty good chance.

As it turns out, we did. The sister teams picked us to be their final alliance partner and the finals matches began. Unfortunately, we were beaten by our opponents in the final match between our division, but we did our best.

Awards were a major focus in our strategy to qualify to Worlds. At Supers, if you get third, second, or first in any award it automatically qualifies you for Worlds. We won first place in the Connect Award, second place Think, and third place Inspire. Also, we were one of a few teams at Supers to qualify three times for Worlds!

ACME is very excited to be heading to the Worlds Competition in Houston, Texas. We couldn’t have done it without our amazing mentors guiding us all through the season. Thanks so much you guys!

If you would like to contribute to our team, please click the I want to help! button at the top of this page. Stay tuned for more information on our process for getting to Worlds!

Go ACME!

Championship

Northern California Regionals

Last weekend, ACME Robotics attended the Northern California Regionals at Newark Memorial High School in Newark, California.  This two-day event was much like the other qualifiers before – except bigger.  56 teams participated and only ten were allowed to advance to the Western Super Regionals.  There were two divisions, Silicon and Gold.   About 28 teams were in each division.  The good thing about divisions is you only have to play teams in your division – until the finals.

This event – as mentioned before – spanned two days.  Saturday evening we checked in, had field inspection and our judges interview. In the week leading up to this event, we spent numerous hours practicing our judges interview.  All our hard reciting payed off, and the interview was one of the best we have ever had.

On Sunday we set up our pit.  Then, went around our division (Silicon) to do Pre-Match Scouting.  After opening ceremonies the matches began.  Our first few matches were not that great.  We were having connectivity issues once again (see the Santa Clara Qualifier), and our robot was quite spastic.  We won a few matches, then lost a few.  It wasn’t our best performance but it wasn’t our worst either.  We finished out the matches in 20th place.

Now, that is not amazing placement in the slightest.  But, we knew we could do better and sought a chance to prove it.  Team 4216, the Rise of Hephaestus, was the top scoring team in our division.  Therefore, they were our best chance at being on the winning alliance.  They had already decided to choose team 5214, Tech Support as their first alliance pick. We had to convince Rise to choose us for their second pick.  We did this by talking to Tech Support.  Our case was that since most teams would off the field and their robot phones turned off, we would be able to preform much better because there would be a stronger signal.

As it turns out, this worked.  Rise of Hephaestus picked us to be their second alliance partners.  Eager to prove they had made the right choice, we gave it our all.  For the first round Rise and Tech Support were up against the fourth place alliance.  They were able to win that match and after the Gold division played their first round, we moved straight into our second round.  During this round, Rise and ourselves were up against two teams who played a very defensive game.  The plan: to fill our Cryptobox as fast as possible then protect Rise’s bot as they  finished their box and tried to score relics.  Our protective strategy worked and we were able to hold off the other team while Rise finished scoring Relics.  The downside was that our relic recover-er was hanging off the robot.  The 3D printed part had snapped off.  Luckily, we had printed an extra part and were able to get it on and working before we started our final match.

Our final match was quite eventful.  It was us and Rise for an alliance. We actually almost soft-capped (meaning we scored all of the points possible between our alliance), but we didn’t score our Glyph during the autonomous period.  During that match both of our teams were able to: knock off the jewel, park in the safe zone, compete a full Cryptobox in a Cipher pattern, score a Relic in the third zone upright, and balance on the Balancing Stone.  If you would like to watch our final match, please click on the link:  ACME and Rise of Hephaestus Final Match .

We had qualified for Super Regionals when we were on the Winning Alliance, but the awards ceremonies had just begun.   We were nominated for several awards, including the Control Award, the Innovate Award and the Think Award.  The real surprise, however, came when the Inspire Award winner was announced.  The Inspire Award is the highest award you can win at any FIRST event.  At the Northern California Regionals, ACME Robotics was announced as the winners of the Inspire Award!

This was the first time in ACME history that we have won the Inspire Award at a major tournament such as NorCals.  We were so excited.  After a long day of ups and downs, this was just the thing we needed to complete our tournament experience.

The next step in the season is to participate in Spokane, Washington, at the Western Super Regionals.  We will be starting a GoFundMe campaign soon in order to raise funds for our trip. Keep checking our website for updates on the coming competition.

As always:

GO ACME!