The Trobots traveled to Sedalia, Missouri to compete in the Central Missouri Regional on March 6th - 8th. We faced off with some of the best teams in the Midwest and the competition was fierce. We saw the 3 top teams from Missouri: 1706 Ratchet Rockers, 4255 Team SCREAM, and 1987 Broncobots who probably rank in the top 50 in the world. The field was deep at this little regional and many teams had awesome moments to shine.
Saturday, we got a surprised visit from our Superintendent, Dr Kimbrel. We showcased the best features about FIRST and why we love the program. The students talked with Dr Kimbrel about our needs as a team to have some dedicated place to work on our robot and to build a pipeline in our schools to help train future team members on the skills needed to be successful on the team.
Dr Kimbrel got to see Team SCREAM's Shop which is top notch and the envy of many. He got to see the judges interview the team 3 or 4 times for various award considerations, and he got to see a match before alliance selection where our attention to data really shined to pick the best alliance partners.
After qualifying matches, we finished 11th; we did take some solace in that Statbotics had our EPA 4th overall at that time. We had a rough schedule and some issues in the early matches. After alliance selection, we ended up as captains of the 7th seed alliance with 5809, The Jesubots from Rockhurst High School in KCMO, and 4550, Something's Bruin out of Englewood, CO. It was brutal set of playoff matches, but we slogged our way into the semifinals and ended up 3rd.
Congratulation to the winning alliance 1706 Ratchet Rockers, 4522 Team SCREAM, and 1982 Cougar Robotics. Cheers to the 2nd placed alliance as well, 1987 Broncobots, 4646 Wildcard Robotics from Polk City, IA, and 7662 3RingCricuits and their Kiddie Pool of Doom. That pool denied us at least 30 points. :)
Our takeaways from this tournament were that we need to be able to settle on a shot faster (no bounce), be able to shoot from further away and we need to improve our autonomous options. We have done a full audit of the entire bot and have rebuilt several of the subsystems in the week after this competition.
We are looking forward to our next competition at the Oklahoma Regional. We hope to win an Engineering Award of some sort for our work to improve our documentation practices, improve our electrical, and to constantly improve our robot between Central Missouri and Oklahoma. Follow us at Oklahoma Regional on April 5th and 6th.