Practice makes perfect, hopefully

The competition has officially begun!

An early morning start saw us moving to the Mariucci arena. Before any actual matches, Libuše had to pass the safety inspection. To while away the time between the various parts of the inspection, we did some further testing of the most crucial mechanisms. While all that was going on, some of our members were going around the arena asking about the other teams' robots to give us some information to go off of if we get to pick an alliance in the playoffs.

Soon, it was time for the first practice match, which was our first Libuše on the competition field with other robots around. The match did not go  according to our expectations, the autonomous program did not work and the intake didn't extend as far as it should have. However, our amazing drive team managed to play defense and ended the game with a perfect climb on the ladder, so a very positive note.

The autonomous program, having been repaired by the programming team in the meantime, worked perfectly in this second practice match. We were still unable to collect fuel from the ground, so our main role was rolling it into our zone to help the other robots on our alliance. 

We finally diagnosed what the problem with our intake was after this match; it was too wide and high off the ground, which meant it couldn't really grip the balls. The mechanics solved the problem, and it worked well on the testing field.

The same couldn't be said, however, when the time came for match 3.  The modified intake made Libuše too tall, and she got stuck under one of the obstacles right at the start. The drivers managed to free her, but at the cost of burning one of the motors, which slowed us down greatly for the rest of the match. Our role was once again to pass fuel to our alliance members. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to climb. 

After the third trial match, the competition area was opened to all teams for further practice matches, which we were happy to take advantage of. We played three more, and Libuše lit up the field - the intake was fully functional and we were able to score a few dozen fuel into the hub in each match. It was a great way to end the first day of competition, and we're already looking forward to what tomorrow will bring! 

Yours,

 R. U. R.