Spartan (971) Week 0 Scrimmage
Arriving at the 971 Week 0 Scrimmage event site, we safely offloaded the pitcases and robot from the trailer, and unpacked our pit cases in our designated pit location near the field. The team worked well getting everything set up, including configuring our RADIO so we could move to field calibration. We also had a few of our team members help out by volunteering at the event, covering field resets, refereeing, and clean-up at the conclusion of the event.
The Spartan Week 0 event was incredibly successful for the team, resulting in many learnings from working in the pits with new students, how the robot operated on the field in an Alliance with 5 other robots on the field, and potential match strategies. The team used these learnings to inform what to focus on as we prepare the robot and spares for the Week 2 Silicon Valley District event.
The robot performed well and exceeded our expectations for a week 0 scrimmage. From a mechanical design standpoint, the robot was thoroughly battle-tested during matches. It absorbed several hard impacts with both field elements and other robots, demonstrating that the team has built an incredibly reliable and robust robot. Members of the drive team gained valuable experience working behind the glass with other team members during the match. We significantly improved with our drive team communications and active and inactive shift timing which will be key to maximizing shuttling and scoring during TeleOp.
The pit team got into the groove of things again as they figured out routines and processes while making fixes and changes under pressure. We also got the chance to try out our new, unique scouting app, which will be incredibly useful in the future. We played several matches in an alliance with 971, which resulted in us both scoring into the hub at such a high rate that we were able to jam up the hub with fuel and we didn’t only do this once, but twice.
On Sunday we all took a break from robotics which was greatly appreciated. On Monday during Robotics class, we unpacked the pits, compiled our notes for a debrief, and got the robot onto the practice field for more driver practice and software tuning. We scheduled our debrief for Tuesday evening. During the debrief the team aligned on what exactly needed to be done based on learnings ahead of our first competition. Driver practice, subsystem software tuning, make spare for our twin bot, the goal is to have two identical robots from drivetrain, control system board & wiring, and identical spares so we always have two robots available on our practice field for driver practice, autos and fine tuning,
Our Rookie Driver, Kousha, did great at the Scrimmage, working with our drive coaches James and Anya, especially when you consider this was his first time behind the glass in a full match scrimmage with 6 robots on the field for all of them. Kousha is collaborating with the software team to make sure Valence is a drive-centric robot. Kousha is also racking up practice hours on the field in scrimmages with our backup driver, Alejandro, who is playing defense during TelOp cycles against Kousha as he attempts to score as many points as possible.
You can continue to track our build season progress at our website’s photo album.
