They don’t call those great lakes great for nothing. After a quick flight over one of those bad boys, Team 341 landed in Detroit, Michigan for the FIRST World Championship! The next morning, we began to set up
our pit at the Cobo Center, but it was really just a good time to scout the food spots in the area. The only things that got me through those long competition days were the strawberry smoothies in the lobby, and the robot driven by a fish. He was so cute. While some kids were working on the robot, the rest of the team explored the venue, including the innovation faire where we met some pretty awesome people. Several of our sponsors, including ABB and Rockwell Automation, had booths where we were able to learn more about their companies. We played with ABB’s tic-tac-toe robot, to whom we lost. We also played with a VR simulation from Rockwell Automation, which was quite the trip because I can barely stand up without falling over as is. We even picked up some free merchandise that we definitely didn’t need, but stuffed our bags with anyway. I will cherish my robot stress ball forever.
The first day of competition was pretty grueling. With 8 hours of qualification matches, the scouting team was getting a little fatigued, but fear not! With the help of some new scouting-focused cheers, they started to perk up. Our team was not only easily visible because of our daisy headbands, but easily hearable with our cheer, “I love scouting, yes I do! I love scouting, how ’bout you?” It was certainly much better than our noise makers from before. That night, we popped off at the Ford Field Welcome Party with some karaoke and silent disco. Silent disco on its own is pretty fun, but taking off the headphones and watching kids dance in silence is even more fun. It was a much needed pick me up after watching robots zoom around for an eternity.
As for our robot, we performed pretty well, but ran into some problems during qualifications. We fell onto our conveyor after an unsuccessful climb onto HAB 3, and decided that the climb simply wasn’t worth the risk. We repaired the conveyor, and made a new HAB mechanism that was better suited for climbing onto HAB 2. And boy, did that thing work. We climbed onto HAB 2 in all but one match after changing the mechanism, and we ended qualification matches ranked 13th with a record of 7-3-0. This is the highest ranking we’ve ended qualifications with all season, so we were pretty excited to see such an improvement.
During alliance picking, we were picked into alliance 4 with teams 2168, 2358, and 4590. The matches we played during quarter-finals were pretty close, but we lost both within a fifteen point margin. Thus, we were unable to make it through to semi-finals. We still had a great time watching the Einstein Round Robin and final matches. We may have only touched the floating beach ball once, but we made some awesome memories, and would like to thank our sponsors, parents, and community for helping us bloom this season!
