With an 8am start this morning, we settled into our pit and starting ramping up our campaign at the inaugural Robot World Cup. With 20 alliances comprised of 40 robots, we took up a large portion of the Cloud. Teams from New Zealand and Mexico, from high schools and colleges/universities competed together. A number of AURA team members volunteered today, from running inspection, scoring the games, and resetting the fields. Additionally, our demonstration robot (Matlab) was lent to MIT as well to allow them to compete after their alliance partner’s robot from Mexico was seized at LAX. Competition matches started today, with teams playing the other 9 teams in their division in an effort to rank them before moving into pools. At the end of the first day, we were ranked third in our division with our combination of WP and SP, even though we had a perfect record of 5 wins out of 5 games. Our two robots, Java and Assembly, have worked well throughout the day, with only small glitches during autonomous which have been ironed out. The rankings from the end of the divisions will be used to determine the pools which are played on Wednesday afternoon, before moving to an elimination bracket that will determine the final winner of the competition.
A variety of robots were seen today, from six-bar lifts with roller intakes to linear sliders and tank tread intakes. The competitors at this tournament represent some of the best teams in New Zealand, Mexico, and the world, including former and current World Champions. There was a mixture of gate-up and gate-down play, with goals filled within a minute in the top games. Doublers and Negators were strategically used to swing entire matches in one alliances’s favour.
We’ll be in the Cloud on Queen’s Wharf from 10am to 5pm tomorrow and on Thursday as well – come down and join in the excitement! Find out pit, and we’ll be more than happy to give you a quick tour.