FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC®)

History Main | 2000: CO-OPERTITION FIRST™ | 2001: DIABOLICAL DYNAMICS™ | 2002: ZONE ZEAL™ | 2003: STACK ATTACK™ | 2004: FIRST FRENZY - RAISING THE BAR™ | 2005: TRIPLE PLAY™ | 2006: AIM HIGH™ | 2007: RACK 'N' ROLL™ | 2008: OVERDRIVE™ | 2009: LUNACY® | 2010: BREAKAWAY™ | 2011: LOGOMOTION™ | 2012: REBOUND Rumble™ | 2013: ULTIMATE ASCENT™ | 2014: AERIAL ASSIST™ | 2015: Recycle Rush™ | 2016: Stronghold™ | 2017: Steamworks™ | 2018: POWERUP™ | 2019: DESTINATION: Deep Space™

2003: STACK ATTACK™

FIRST Game Description - Stack Attack

In 2003 we became the Robotic Eagles to align with the traditional school mascot and school colors. It also allowed us to share the Eagle mascot costume and use it at our competitions, and our team uniform became a little more...uniform.
We started great, using the 2002 robot as a prototype and cannibalizing parts from the 2001 robot to add to the prototype. The 2002 robot had the same drivetrain design, but this year's used beefier #35 chain and a stronger frame and drivetrain changeover mechanism. The 2002 robot was invaluable for developing our scripting autonomous program. Scripting allowed easy, risk free changes to the autonomous actions before a match, and even allowed one of our programmers to develop a visual PC-based tool to drag a simulated robot around on a simulated field and automatically generate the resulting autonomous script. Voila, instant new program! After a lot of extra hours and a few design changes, we finished building the robot - it came out great!

We attended a first week Regional at Manchester, NH, our home SBPLI regional in Brentwood, NY, and the Championship held in Houston, TX this year. We ended the qualifying matches in position at both regionals to pick our finals partners for the first time ever. It was a heady experience for us and taught us some important lessons about good Scouting. We had a strong scouting program, but the results had never been put to the test before. In the New Hampshire Regional, we won the Xerox Creative Design Award and came in third in both the seeding rounds and the finals along with Krunch (79) and F.O.R.C.E. (1073).
We didn't have a cohesive drive team approach, many people took a turn at driving, some better, some worse. Jess Moore, Billy Gerheart and others did well. The biggest drawback was inexperience with the crab-style drive which was difficult to master. Our driver's biggest issues were figuring out which side was the front of the robot, because it looked pretty much the same from any direction, and since we have a low-'bot to slip under the side rails it was impossible to see where the robot was on the far side of the ramp. The front side of the robot got painted gold and the joysticks were marked to match (gold=forward, silver=back, side-to-side were left plain), and those bicycle fiberglass poles were added so they could be spotted over the obscuring ramp.

In the Long Island Regional, we won Delphi's "Driving Tomorrow's Technology" Award and the Johnson & Johnson Sportsmanship Award for donating the practice field and our programmers, who spent a lot of time in other team pits creating autonomous modes. We were undefeated and came in first in the seeding rounds. We picked R.A.G.E. (173) and The Duck Tape Bandits (467) to be our allies, but we were knocked out in the first of the elimination rounds.

There were many problems with Nationals, both technical and otherwise. Since school trips were not allowed out of state at this point, we were not allowed to go as a school sanctioned event and unfortunatly our teacher advisors were unable to attend. Our parents and engineers, however, filled in and did a great job of holding the team together while at Championships. The trip to Houston went very well and we were picked for finals on Galileo for our very first time. The teachers followed our advance on the webcast. What gets remembered about Houston is the multi-story ramps we had to push the robots up and down to get into and out of the pit area and into the stadium next door for the playing fields.
We made changes to the sprocket ratio and changed to pneumatic tires to give ourselves better pushing and holding power. The tires worked wonders, however, the sprockets were a disaster and with the resulting technical difficulties, we ended being seeded 58^th in our division. For the first time we made it into the playoffs, however, Da Bears (247) and Cedar Falls H.S. (525)picked us to be allied with them. We played the first match against R.A.G.E. (173) and Team Hot (67). Unfortunately we were knocked out in the quarter finals.

The first year of autonomous play was great (for us)! We designed a low robot to slide under the playing field bar using a beefed up version of our crab drive from 2002 and an arm with about a six foot span to push and manipulate bins with. Our design and very successful autonomous won us technical awards at each regional.
It was one of the few robots with working autonomous modes. Out of the crate in our first practice match our robot was like an autonomous bullet. And Mr. Tiu had to hit the emergency stop when it went right up over the ramp, through the stacks of bins and attempted to drive full speed through the driver station wall. The programming team had sort of thought there would be other robots pushing back on the other side of the bins, but not a single other robot had so much as moved during autonomous. The controls that worked going into the crate came out of the crate reversed for some reason in Manchester. We quickly fixed that, unfortunately, both the electrical and software teams implemented solutions independently, so the next match saw a repeat of the exact same problem and some puzzled looks. A case of two “rights” making a wrong. Oops, communication is fundamental! It took a few rounds to work out bugs in the autonomous and regular driving modes. We spent some time learning to setup the robot the same way every time, so things are repeatable and the robot is where the software expects it to be, making sure the pneumatics were charged before the match began (needed for the crab drive to operate).

This year also marked our first submission in the Animation portion of the competition, but the animator couldn’t make the presentation to the judges Friday during school hours at SBPLI.

Booster Club fundraising ran a one night Oldies concert, a 50/50, and a car raffle. The car raffle tickets were $100 and not many were sold, so it became a 50/50 instead. The winner often donates back some of the money each year since. The team give-away was a team pen with a tiny steel BB maze.



Pictures:

• Building Pictures
• BAE Granite State Regional Pictures
• SBPLI Long Island Regional Pictures
• Nationals Pictures

FIRST Stack Attack Videos
FIRST Stack Attack Robot
Team Trifold Brochure
School Board Festo Thank You
The Team
Seniors
Officers
Quick Reference
Team 358 Team Rules/Intro Mtg.
FIRST Stack Attack Code