Mar 27 2015
The 2015 Arizona VEX U Competition was held on Feb. 28 at the Arizona State University campus. Twelve members of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University VEX Robotics Team and their faculty advisor Dr. Joel Schipper attended the event. The team competed with two robots, a small robot named Spike and a large robot named Monstrosity.
According to VEX specifications the small robot had to be fit inside a 15 inch cube, and the large robot had to fit inside a 24 inch cube. Since the team is at university level, both the small and big robots compete on the same field as a team against another college team’s pair of robots.
The competition this year involved building a tower by stacking cylindrical pieces which are called sky rise pieces, then fit cubes over the tower and posts along the edge of the field. Additional points can be scored by placing the cubes onto colored squares on the ground. Each of the individual matches began with a 45 second autonomous period. This was where the robot moves based on programming that has been completed prior to the match and loaded onto the robot. After the autonomous period there was one minute and 15 seconds of driver control period. During this time a team member drove the robot from the sidelines.
There were six rounds of qualifying matches during the competition. The team’s small robot was designed to pick up cubes and place them on the shortest posts on the edge of the field which were 24 inches tall, as well as deliver cubes to the larger robot to stack onto the tower. The small robot worked as designed. Josh Warren said, “The small robot scored really well in comparison to the other teams.”
However the large robot had a malfunction with its lift mechanism, the lift motors repeatedly failed and thus couldn’t complete construction of the tower. The team was also unable to load any autonomous program onto the large robot so it didn’t operate during the autonomous period of the matches.
Bryce Chanes said, “We got third after qualifying matches were finished.” However, the team was defeated in the first round of finals.
“I think the competition went fairly well considering that we did not test one of the robots [the large robot] until the competition and we were writing code at the competition. We learned a lot and we’ve made goals for next season already,” said team member Christina Openshaw.
Source: http://erau-news.com/