I’ve competed at debate tournaments and soccer tournaments, but I had no idea what to expect last Thursday when I walked into the Patriot Center for my first robotics tournament.

Each of the 50 teams in attendance showed up dressed in their team shirts, creating a rainbow sea of people milling about with patches of red, green, purple and black. Everyone sported a highly fashionable pair of safety goggles.

Despite the early morning start, everyone was buzzing with anticipation and excitement for the start of the tournament. After months of hard work, including six weeks of the intensive build season, it was finally time.

I did a double-take as I walked into the stadium—there were rows of booths set up like a craft show on one side of the court. But they were robot pits, not artisan stations. Each team had their own pit where they would work on their robots and meet with other teams.

The other side of the court contained the competition field. This year’s FIRST Robotics challenge, Aerial Assist, involved robots working in three-team alliances to receive points by scoring goals, passing over a truss and having multiple robot pass sequences. Some teams, like ours, chose to focus on a defensive robot, blocking the other team from scoring.

Thursday was a practice day. Teams were busy making the final tweaks and repairs to make sure their robots were working properly in between practice matches. In the pit, some people worked on the code for the robot’s autonomous functions, while others worked mechanically to make sure the robot could drive properly. The drive team, including a coach, two drivers and the human player, took the robot onto the field for practice games and to test the functionality.

The rest of the team was scouting. Because we had to work in alliances with two other teams, it was important to know what types of robots other teams had, as well as how well they performed.

Part of the team recorded their observations from watching the robots play in matches. I was on the pit scouting team. We went to all 50 pits and asked team members to describe their team strategy as well as all of the features on their robot, then formulated strategies with the drive team for each round.

Friday and Saturday morning were filled with qualification rounds, in which our robot, Raffa faired only okay.  There were some glitches in the mobility of our robot, and we knew we weren’t highly ranked going into eliminations, but there was hope that another team would pick us for their alliance, because we were one of few solely defensive robots.
Unfortunately this was not the case. We were able to spend the afternoon intensely focused on working out the kinks though, so we can perform better this weekend at the Chesapeake regional.

Of course our loss was disappointing, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the high-energy weekend, full of cheering, team bonding, new friends, strategy and of course, robots playing sports.