Robotics Experience Part 2

September 2, 2019

After many weeks of hard training, we finally made it to the eliminations! We arrived a little late because of traffic but there was no big problem. When I arrived I was directed to the table where my teammates were. I was paired with 2 people, Matias and Owen.

The ruled for the competition were simple, we all had 2 and a half hours to finish building, coding, and testing. After said time was up we will be called and one by one we will run our code at our respective course and determine our finishing score. There were multiple obstacles on the course, our course was very hard. It had many passengers in different places, we had to bring them to their respective locations in order to complete the challenge. What was so hard about this was we had to create a code that automatically detected the color (Their color determines where they are supposed to be) and has to have a pre-programmed code that makes it go to where they are supposed to be, so that means we need to make a custom code for all the locations in order to bring the passengers where they need to be.

Luckily I was teamed with 2 coding pros! When I arrived the competition already started and my teammates were knee-deep in code so I thought it would be helpful if I lined up before all the other teams did. Though there was already a huge line at least I made it before the others did. The line was really long! I didn't expect it to take 20 minutes to run just once! Because of this, we were only able to test our code out 3 times sadly, but the results impressed us!

After the 2.5 hours were up we were called one by one to run our final product and determine whether or not we got in the semi-finals, our code was decent but we didn't think it would make it. So we sat down and chatted while waiting for our turn.

After a while our team was called then we went to the course and ran our code. It did as planned, it delivered a few of the passengers to their respective locations, it's just that it missed a few thus lowering our score a bit but not too much.

After we ran our code all we had to do is wait for the winners to be announced and the awarding. This would take long but I had a really bad headache due to the stadium being too bright, so I slept through it all.

When the winners were announced we were surprised to hear our team name! We got through the eliminations!

To Be continued