We’re going to STATE! On Saturday, January 21st, we at Trial and Error Robotics secured our golden ticket to the Mississippi FTC State Championship. This competition was our third and final qualifier of the season hosted by FTC Team #12390, Robotic Raiders in Meridian, MS. We look forward to competing in the Mississippi FTC State Competition, hosted at The University of Mississippi in Oxford. 

The competition day started off smoothly with our judging session. Even with the absence of our build team captain, our second build team member was successful in articulating our robot’s design clearly to the judges. Additionally, explaining our team’s professional and community outreach efforts to the judge’s panel helped secure our later acquisition of the Connect award and runner up placement for the prestigious Inspire Award respectively. 

We were ranked second seed by the end of the normal competition after having lost only one match. Ultimately, with the help of third seed Team #16151 R U Serious as our alliance partner, we won the overall competition as alliance leaders.  As part of our winning strategy, we utilized cone-stacking and coverage techniques on the field while prioritizing incremental scoring over higher point value maneuvers. At the end of the day, we owe our success to our cooperation efforts with other teams employing a diverse array of designs, and considering how those differences in design could play to our advantage as an alliance in competition. As a result, we are currently ranked third overall for FTC teams in Mississippi.

Although we are celebrating our recent victory, our team members are simultaneously hard at work improving our robot and strategy before state championships in Oxford, MS on March 3rd. While at the competition, we exchanged ideas with other teams on how to improve our respective autonomous programs using IMU’s (integrated measurement units) to interface with a gyroscope thus improving accuracy and speed in driving. On the assembly side, our builders aim to upgrade by implementing new sensors to expand software capabilities, skeletonizing our lift system to reduce weight and overall profile, implementing a new claw design to manipulate game elements, and standardizing all hardware on our robot to 8 millimeter hex shaft.

We look forward to competing against our fellow teams in Oxford, best of luck!