Tournament Update

Stay tuned, and find out what's happening day to day.

April 18: Technobotts win Innovative Design Trophy!

TechnoBotts3 came 4th out of 84 robots in robot performance, so narrowly missed a trophy there (there were trophies for first, second and third, won by Brazil, Singapore and China respectively- no US robots achieved a 400-point run at the FIRST World Festival, but 4 foreign teams did!), BUT we won the 1st place for Innovative Design trophy! So we're all really thrilled about that.

The boys are currently cooling off in the hotel pool at present - we'll be off to lunch at a fancy restaurant next to celebrate the trophy win, and later on today it's the FIRST Finale - a big party in Centennial Olympic Park, which we're all looking forward to hugely.

April 17:

Today the team had the 3 robot runs in the Georgia Dome. First run - 370 points, which was enough to put us in first place for a while! It was a good feeling seeing Technobotts3 at the very top of the scoreboard.

Second run - we did it - a perfect score! 400 points!

Third run - 365 points. (would have been 380 points but the table ref decided to object to our yellow ball delivery strategy, where the team uses it as the ball caster for the robot, which none of the other refs had objected to.)

We've ended up in 4th place in robot performance overall. There were other 400 point scores - by teams from Brazil, China and Singapore - and their second highest scores were higher than our second highest score. Highest US score was 395.

The team had LOTS of visits from the technical judges today, both at the competition tables and in the pit area.

Awards ceremony is at 9am tomorrow morning in the Omni Hotel ballroom - we'll be going along with our hats, t-shirts and team banner and keeping everything crossed - we would dearly love to bring a trophy back to the UK.

Tonight we're off to the Georgia Aquarium.

April 16:

After a painfully early start (the team left the hotel at 7.15 am) we walked down to the GWCC to get to the pit area for opening at 8am, picking up some donuts for breakfast on the way.

The team settled into the pits and put the robot together (it had travelled minus its wheels as 2 years ago a robot that flew to Atlanta and sat in a plastic box for a week had non-circular tyres after that and wouldn't steer straight, and we didn't want to risk that happening again.

A couple of good runs on the practice tables in the pit area later (380 and 395 points) and the team went round a third of the FLL teams handing out good luck cards that they had made and signed, before the morning's judging sessions started. Judging was 10.10 for the project, 10.30 for the technical and 10.50 for the teamwork, all of which went quite well. The team ran out of time to tell the judges all the good things about their robot in the technical judging, and the teamwork judges were quite tickled by the boys' British accents and their efforts to explain exactly what a Jaffa Cake was (that's essential fuel for the TechnoBotts3 team).

12.55 was the first practice robot run in the Georgia Dome - a bogglingly vast place! - and the robot was plagued with the variable light levels inside the Georgia Dome, which has a translucent roof, so clouds going across the sun have a big impact on the light levels on the table, rendering the calibration routine that the boys do during setup time pretty much useless. This caused the delivering the levees program to go haywire, which cost 50 points, and also the team mis-delivered the polar bear, which cost another 15 points. So that gave a score of 335 points - which was enough to put the team in 4th position after the first run.

2.20 was the second practice run - again, problems with wildly fluctuating light levels upset the levee delivery program and also the ice core rig retrieval and the ice core extraction - costing more points, so a disappointing 275 points for that run.

Another team scored higher than 335 on their second round, knocking the team into 5th place, but fortunately the scores from today don't count - it's how well the robot performs tomorrow in the official 3 robot rounds that's the important thing.

This evening it's the FLL opening ceremonies and ice-cream social in Centennial Olympic Park - the weary TechnoBotts3 team is currently in the hotel pool recharging, and we'll take them for some food first to refuel them.

April 14:

We've arrived in Atlanta. The tournament begins tomorrow.