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The robot page has been updated with a recap of this season, and the homepage now has a new photo. There may be some more updates coming soon. Remember! You can still register for camps if you have not already. Be sure to tell anyone you think might be interested. Registration can be done at http://www.teamtitanium.org/camps.html Summer’s only a couple weeks away. So, I seem to notice that I have not updated on the status of our tournaments. I should fix that! Week 5, this is the last chance for the team to earn our way into the Championship (I already had my ticket for Dean’s List, but it would be a lot more fun with the rest of the team!) We had to step up our game, because Team Driven (1730) already made it in (Engineering Inspiration in KC) and Team Broncobots (1987) earned their way in the week before (Winner AND Chairman’s Award in Oklahoma). We did not want to get left out! Coming in to the North Star Regional, we had an unlucky time in Kansas City, but used the opporotunity to make totally sure that nothing was broken and that the programming was perfect. Mechanical wise, nothing was broken, out of place, or even faulty. Honestly, we still did amazing in Kansas City, and was shocked to not win anything. We wanted to make sure to change that! The start of North Star started a little rocky, but after getting some modifications put on to the robot, it worked like a charm! Remember that this Regional, more than a lot of other Regionals, had a lot of rookie and second-year teams (about half), so they could have been really good or bad, depending on the seeding point capability. This year’s scoring is a lot different; it is really good if the scores are high and close together, but if your opponents cannot score, then you do not benefit from winning as much as if they did. There was a lot of scouting that went into this Regional, to make sure that we could score big, no matter who we were with or against. Our first qualifying match ended 10-1 in our favor, making the high score of the Regional immediately! This would be the way the team ran for the entire Regional, except after about 3/4 of the way through the match, we actually turned around to score for the other teams, to raise our seeding points! We were 1st place for the bulk of the Regional, going back and forth between the legendary team 71 (4-time World Champions) for 1st place. The team went 8-0 before our last match, where the teams started getting pretty violent. The reason our alliances have been scoring so well is because of our amazing kicker, able to kick from all three sections accurately. So, these teams going against us wanted to show us what they could do on the basis of defense. Force3 is just such an amazing scorer, that we were still scoring, even when being double-teamed on a wall! That match ended 6-1, not one of our highest scoring matches, but still good at this Regional. Unfortunately, 71 had a fantastic final qualifying match, edging us out for 1st place by only 3 seeding points. We had been talking with 71 ever since Thursday, because both of our teams clearly noticed that we were the two dominant teams at this Regional. Coming to Elimination Selections, 71 picks us to be in the #1 Alliance, the very first time for us, and we were honored to be in this dominant position. 71’s robot involved a narrow chassis, a small kicker in their front, and an accurate hanging mechanism, which we really needed to win this Regonal. The next team, 171, ranked behind us, was more that 40 points behind us in seeding points and 3 wins behind us as well. We would later see them in the Finals. Our third pick for the alliance was the defensively strong 2667. Our first elimination match got the #8 alliance disqualified for messing 71 violently while they were hanging. It wouldn’t have mattered because we would have won 11-0 regardless. The #8 alliance was eliminated after 2 matches. Our first semifinal match against the #4 alliance set the final high score of the Regional, 18-7, and we beat them after 2 matches as well. The Finals, against the #2 alliance, with teams 171, 537, and 2041, was by far the most difficult alliance to face throughout the entire Regional. The first match ended 13-8, and it looked like it would be like any of our other matches, a sweep. The #2 alliance drastically changed their strategy, trying to shut down our scoring, and reduced us down to 9-8. The bad news about this match is that our alliance’s Trident player got us a DOGMA penalty, forcing our first tie of the Regional. 2667’s robot consistently flipped over in eliminations, and this little mishap cost us two more matches, because our next match AGAIN ended in a tie! For our fourth Final match we decided to put 2667 at defense, while us and 71 continued our scoring ways, and successfully shut down the #2 alliance, winning 7-4. This riddiculous set of Final maches capped off the team’s first Winning Alliance ever!!! The team amazingly ended the Regional with an undefeated streak of 15-0-2 (technically the two ties are thrown out in eliminations, so it still counts), the first time for any of the Lee’s Summit teams to ever end undefeated! To add to this amazing feat, the team won the Regional’s Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award. This award honors the team that has the most innovative and creative control system. Along with our swerve drive, this award included the camera use with the new Classmate PC, and the partially auto piloted bump climbing program. These awards gave us the right to attend the FIRST Championship once again! ——- Last week was the FIRST Championship in Atlanta, for the last time (next year it will be in St. Louis, even closer for us). This Championship was so much sweeter that last year because for one, I had the chance to win Dean’s List, but mainly because we were all there based purely on our robot, not by our presentation skills. As Mr. Bailey put it from North Star, ‘ our Final matches here are going to be nothing compared to anything in the Championship’, so we got prepared for some real competing. We were in the Curie Division, possibly one of the most difficult Divisions to be in because of the teams 1114 (Canadian team and all around amazing robot builders) and 469 (the so called ’gamebreaker’ robot team), and if they combined, they could not be beat. We were called the ‘Dark Horse’ team by Chief Delphi, meaning we were going to be one of the best teams out of nowhere and could possibly win it all. To start our Division run, we started competing early to let each team get 10 qualification matches in, but that did not stop us. Since we were running perfect at the end of North Star, there was nothing to really do to the robot, so we were at a peak position to do great. Our first match started strong at 8-7, but being against these strong teams, that was not much of a high score, but it was fantastic for seeding points. It was nonetheless a great start! We ended Thursday qualifying at #1 out of all 86 teams in our Division, and I am thruoughly proud to be able to say that! Our matches started getting gratually getting better, with scores of 11-8, 12-6, and 15-5, but suffered our first and only qualification loss of all of North Star and the Championship next round, losing a close 9-6. We were against some really tough teams, but that didn’t stop our winning ways! At the end of Friday we had dropped a little to 5th, but were determined to get back in the hunt for first. We got back in the saddle with scores of 13-7, 8-1, 11-5, 14-9, and 14-7, all wins, bringing our final ranking back up to 3rd! We were ranked only behind 1114 and 111, two amazing teams. At the Elimination Selection, 1114 picked 469, the alliance the entire world was dreading (no joke!) and 111 picked 1538, an amazing defensive and pushing robot (with spinners!). We decided to pick 1676, the Pasack PI-oneers because we were with them in our most amazing 14-9 win, and they had an amazing kicker and hanging system. Even better, their drive team was arguably the best team of people I have ever had the pleasure of teaming up with! Our third pick was 888, the Robotiators, because of their fantastic defensive skills, completing our #3 alliance. Up against the #6 alliance was our good friends, team 573, who gave us their ‘Brick Wall Award’ for playing the best defense in the division. Keep in mind that we never play defense, and they gave this award to us right before the qualifying match against them. Coinsidence? Regardless, the first match ended in a close and intense 14-13 in our favor. The next match was probably the most riddiculous and outrageous I would say for any Regional, Division, or District Tournament the whole year! This match started poorly with 1676 not fully connecting to the field, so they were disabled for the entire match. To add to the craziness, 888 ended up kicking a ball INTO the bottom side of the ball return, so this messed up the track for the balls that really returned from the return, and messed up the angle of depression. THAT ended up getting 5 seperate soccer balls getting stuck on the end of the ball return, so we were missing 6 balls for part of the match. To add to THAT, the field walls were falling apart, so the shield that protected the robots from the walkway onto the field got stuck under our robot. We would have lost easily, but luckily, that match got thrown out! Thank you Refs, by the way. The next match, was comparatively worse, because there was some sort of connection issue for 888’s robot, so they were disabled for our next match. With a 2-v-3 match, us and 1676 did really good, but lost a high scoring match 14-19. We then figured out that 888’s c-Rio’s main wires were sheared, and had to opt out. The next in line was 1421, a mainly front zone, offensive robot. It looked like our strategy was shot, but 1421 really stepped up, and was able to win our 4th quarterfinal match 8-5. Our semifinal set of matches were against the famous 111, the Wildstangs, which had a really good kicker, of the #2 alliance. With no suprise to the audience and the teams, we made the upset against #2 with two easy matches winning 13-9 and 10-4. This #3 alliance made the first real upset of the Curie Division, making it to the Final Rounds, unfortunately against 1114 & 469. The first match ended in a loss, 11-24, but we were not suprised going against this scary alliance. The next match, Dominic, our Head Scout, came out with the risky idea to change our autonomous to attempt to stop 469 from starting their infamous looping system. It worked! But the success didn’t last long, and we lost a tough loss 10-21. This #3 alliance was by far one of the most amazing out of the entire World Championship, and I honestly think that if this alliance, or 469, could have been in another Divison, we could have made it to Einstein. During the Final Matches/Award Ceremony, the team was extremely suprised to win the World Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award! If we weren’t all smiles now from the amazing job and best year ever, we sure were now! We are so proud and honored to win this Award, proving that we have the best control system in the world for 2010! Not only becoming a Curie Division Finalist, but winning a World-caliber Award! This is by far the best season for any of the three Lee’s Summit teams ever! We actually ended up 36-10-3 through all 3 of our tournaments, and 28-4 in just North Star and the Championship! That is an amazing record, all because of the sheer greatness of this robot! I am truly proud to be part of Team Titanium after having one of the best robots, one of the best teams, and one of the best control systems in the World! If you would like to see any of this year’s legal matches (they left out the ‘Ball Return’ match), then check out http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/team/1986 to see how Force3 did this year! Well, the competing is over, but the 2011 season is about to start soon with our Summer Adventures, so stick around to see what Team Titanium accomplishes next! 2 months until Team Titanium’s Summer Adventures! 7 months until Cowtown Throwdown (hopefully)! A few updates are coming to the website in the next few days! Some are major, some are minor. The webmaster would have got these put up a little sooner, but he was on vacation in Texas, and has just recently returned to the Arctic Missouri. The updates that are available now include…
The updates yet to come include:
Well, the Regional in my opinion went amazing-ish, but Mr. Bailey, Co-Head Coach and all around amazing teacher, pretty much summed it up for me! So here’s his stuff. Over the weekend 59 teams met at Hale Arena for a robotics tournament. Each of these teams spent 6 weeks designing, prototyping, building, programming, breaking, and rebuilding a robot that could climb over foot high speed bumps, crawl through 18 inch high tunnels, hang from 7 foot towers, and accurately dribble and kick a soccer ball into a goal protected by a ramp and chains. The weekend started off with a few flakey moments. We had two rounds where our gyro was disconnected from the robot causing us to flip upside down as we crossed over the bump, one round where the joystick failed to initialize leaving the drivers with no control over the robot, and one round where we lost communication with the field and could not move. That left us 6 rounds to prove our stuff, and boy did the team come through big. Mark Spatz was the lead driver with Huo Huo Liu as the co-pilot. Joe Bradish coached and Collin Robinett and Michael Creech operated the ball return system. At one point (match 32) we had the highest score in the nation. By the time we finished proving to the field that our technological glitches were behind us we ended up being the 4th draft pick in the tournament. The alliance we played with in the championship rounds was captained by a combined team from Blue Springs and Blue Springs South. Lee’s Summit High School was selected with the 21st draft pick to join our alliance. The team won a “best two out of three” match in the quarter finals to advance to the semi’s where we were defeated by the eventual champions. Two of our best matches can be seen at the following links: Qualification Match 32: http://www.more.net/content/2010-first-robotics-qualification-matches QuarterFinal Match 10: http://www.more.net/content/2010-first-robotics-quarterfinal-matches Collin Robinett was named a finalist for the Dean’s List Award. This is the highest honor that an individual student can earn at the tournament. 4,000 word essays written about individual students were used to evaluate how a student exhibits the following characteristics: o Leadership and commitment to the ideals of FIRST Collin will advance on to the World Championships in Atlanta where 10 of the Dean’s List Award Finalists from the regional tournaments will be selected as winners. The Dean’s List Award comes with the following benefits: o A written recommendation from FIRST leadership to the college or employer of each student’s choice. The team is made up of both adults and students from the Lee’s Summit community. Besides operating the robot other members of the team were extremely helpful with fixing the robot in the pits, scouting out the other teams and planning strategies, running the Guitar Hero robot which introduced hundreds of spectators to robots and programming, running the 5th Gear simulation where a virtual version of the game was played, and talking to judges and the public about the future of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. So there you go! Minneapolis here we come! Only 4 weeks left until North Star! We have a new video of our Breakaway robot up on Youtube. It’s available below. As posted on our Chief Delphi thread, this year’s robot has the following features:
The final week of the build season has gone and past, but we got a whole lot of stuff done and ready to go! First off, the last week of the build season involved making some final tweeks to some mechanisms, building some brackets, making some bumpers, and just getting every last little thing done with this robot! Another big part was getting a deflector finalized. We used a cloth ‘hammock’ during testing, and it finally came together a couple of days ago. It works extremely well, to the point where we can recover soccer balls that bounce off our robot and onto the floor with our ball magnet system. That is working really great, like the rest of the robot!
The other big part of this last week was final testing of the systems. With our drive station completed, we were able to determine our drive team, and get practice for everyone who wanted to know how to drive the robot. Our robot drives like a charm! We are able to literally glide all around the field, while still making extremely accurate shots with our amazing kicker. So cool! Also, we are able to traverse the bump with ease, and in about 7 seconds, saving us a lot of time to play the game! I would like to thank team 1710, Raven Robotics, for giving us some peace of mind about bump traversing with the bumpers on. Ours has the same kind of problem, but it is nice to see a team confirm some ideas of ours, so thanks a bunch! Another huge part of the week was the always tedious process of designing an autonomous mode. We had so much time to work on it, but this week just goes by so fast. We decided that we would have a program that would be able to kick from the far section, to successfully score 3 soccer balls in 15 seconds. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens in Kansas City! Team Titanium as a whole greatly appreciates this extra weekend that we got for the build season, because we were able to get so much more done in that 48 or so extra hours. The last days were not as much of a rush as recent years, but definitely was interesting to say the least. The final night on Tuesday was a long one, involving our drivers getting some final practice before bagging, and we definitely proved that our drivers are going to be amazing in the Regionals (hopefully leading to World)! We also spent that last night getting every nut tightened, every chain oiled, and every bolt in place. Like our word earlier in the build season, we got done with seconds to spare, at 11:53 pm. that night. Every second counted!
Now is the wait and process of getting ready for Kansas City, with still a lot of stuff to still get ready, put together, and design in this last week before competition! We still have a long way to go! Next stop, Kansas City in One Week! One week left, and we are so close to the finish of the season, but we still have a long way to go! First, I apologize for not getting the blog for last week up until now; the last two weeks have been definitely filled with mechanical, electrical, and public relational excitement! Since Week 3, the robot has had plenty of progress done to it, including the addition of the kicker, a roller, and the camera (sort of). Plenty of testing has gone on with all three. We have had to shorten some pieces of surgical tubing for the kicker, place some floating brackets for the roller, and target tested with the camera (after some thorough spray painting of the target). Everything either works great, or still needs some refining. Plus, we have been able to kick over two bumps, and are able to traverse the bump quite nicely! This video is officially the first of our robot on the blog up to now, and I believe it shows how amazing the robot is up until now. And, some great convenience has led to the design to the best bumpers we have ever had, with the ability of being interchangeable with opposite sides! Pretty impressive if I do say so myself! With only a little over a week left, the robot is looking fantastic! Our programmers have been able to pretty much define what our driver’s station will look like and do. We are looking to do a single joystick with some extra abilities for the second driver. It has potential to be looking pretty cool. Along with making the robot work smoothly, the programmers are rocking so far! The last two weeks have still been definitely interesting for the entire team. Last Sunday was the Lee’s Summit R-7 Robotics Alliance Open House, where team members, parents, mentors, and some special visitors got to openly see all three team build sites, robots included. It sounded like a success from all three teams, with some robotic madness spread out too! Those special visitors I mentioned included two State Representatives, Representative Jeff Grisamore and Representative Will Kraus. I personally showed them around our build site, including a demo of the robot, some of the field elements, past years’ robots, and Titan, the Guitar Hero robot. I explained how the build season works, what we have done in Team Titanium’s four years in existence, and how the robots worked. The Representatives seemed really interested and proud in what students like us were able to do. By the way, look out for a press release from Representative Grisamore about our team, pictures included! Here are some pictures of Grisamore and Kraus that we took:
Other than some of that excitement, we have been able to get some very important stuff done or close to done around the build site and the area. Earlier this week, we had some students go up with Mr. Spatz and Dave, our Billy Goat guy to see where the Billy Goat engineers get to work in their condition, and got to see where we get our parts welded. Pretty cool where they work! In the middle of the week, a few representatives from the team presented our build site and robot to some college student entrepreneurs where they got to see some practical business possibilities provided by our team. That went over really well! We have also had a boost in spirit these last few weeks. My sister, Tessa, along with most of the team, have been working on signs, big numbers, and refurbished eyes for the stands. There is no way we’re not going to get noticed! Lastly, we are now able to change the look of our team, slightly, with the addition of our brand new banner! (below) I would personally like to thank Paul, our website (and now banner) creator for doing a great job making the new banner design, and a BIG thank you to Josh’s cousin, Tim, for printing out the banner, and some really sweet decals!
With only one week left, we still have a lot to do, but the team’s potential will shine this last week to make it one of the best in past years! Here we go! Only 3 weeks left until Kansas City! Collin Robinett, Team Titanium Captain
For the next four Wednesdays, starting this next Wednesday (the 10th), the members of the Lee’s Summit R-7 Robotics Alliance will be featured in the Lee’s Summit Journal! Please be sure to pick up a copy of the paper (published on Wednesdays and Fridays), or visit the Journal website at www.lsjournal.com . ~Team Titanium PR Team CORRECTION: The starting date was incorrect. The error has been fixed. The members of the Lee’s Summit R-7 Robotics Alliance are having an open house this Sunday! All three build sites will be open at the same time: 1 – 4 pm. Directions:Lee’s Summit West – Team Titanium (1986)Team Titanium’s build site is located at 1803 SW Jefferson St in Lee’s Summit – home of Billy Goat Industries. To get to the site, take Highway 291 South to Persels Road, then turn west (right) . Turn left (south) onto Jefferson Street and go until you see the large Billy Goat sign on your left. Go all the way down to the end parking lot. We are located in “Billy Goat University” down the hill from the parking lot. Google Maps link to Team Titanium’s site. Lee’s Summit – Team Driven (1730)Team Driven’s build site is located at 1009 SE Browning St in Lee’s Summit. To get to the site, take Highway 50 to the Hamblen Rd/291 exit, and get on the southern outer road (Oldham Pkwy). Continue to Browning St and take a left. It will be the second building on your left. Google Maps link to Team Driven’s site. Lee’s Summit North – Team Broncobots (1987)Team Broncobots build site is located at ~15000 E 87th St in Kansas City. To get to the site, take Highway 350 north to the Colbern Rd exit and head east to the Blue Pkwy stoplight, where you turn north. Turn off onto Rhinehart Rd, right before Hazel Grove Elementary. Continue north on Rhinehart until you reach 87th Street, then turn right. It will be the first house on the right. Google Maps link to Team Broncobots site. ~Team Titanium PR Team Well, we’re halfway there, ohhh, building a soccer player! Take this wrench, I’ll use it, I sware, ohhh, building a soccer player! Ok, singing antics aside, we really are halfway through the build season, and everything is coming together quite nicely! Field construction is still underway, but with the tower the main focus. The tower struts are built, but its structural integrety has been brought into question with multiple guys trying to use it as pull-up bars. Since it is just a mock-up, it does not particularily matter, but it is still funny. Next is the tunnel to build! Along the lines of programming and the robot, it drives! Some tedious work by our programming team and some fairly difficult building, rebuilding, and fixing of the robot by the mechanical team has led to one of the smoothest driving robots that has ever come out of Team Titanium Robotics! Bonus, the kicker is almost entirely put together and on the robot, but due to some missing ordered pieces from some companies (probably swamped by all of the Robotics teams asking for a bunch of parts at the same time), we cannot fully build and finalize the kicker, but it still looks cool! With the robot, some late prototyping of rollers, some cart overhauling, and Chairman’s, the team has been keeping really busy lately! On a final, very awesome note, our main animation engineer, Chris, has just finished, for the most part, a Breakaway field that is fully playable on by a toy car that he created on a animation program. The field has been sent to 5th Gear, the Video Game gods for First and First’s FRC game video games, and will most definitely be used as the field for THE video game at the FIRST Championship! I’ve watched it, and this field is insanely fantastic! You can score, scale bumps, and have some serious fun playing this game! Congrats on the amazing job Chris! If you would like to see a copy of the game and field, go to our Resources page to check it out! Only 5 weeks until Kansas City! Collin Robinett, Team Titanium Captain |
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