Taiwan Open, the national competition that has world qualifying awards, is the one I will be introducing. This is the second to the last competition we will attend in Taiwan this season, and is especially important since there is three spots to qualify for worlds.
The excellence award, and two teams on the tournament champion alliance. These are what we are aiming for in this competition. Also, if one team got two of the world qualifying awards, the eligibility will be passed down to the skills ranking. That is why skills challenges are also very important.
We continued to improve the robot we used for the previous competition, PAS signature event. After analyzing and organizing our time after PAS, we think that we don't have enough time to reconstruct a robot and also fully practice using it.
The competition is separated into two days. First day morning is all about skills challenge and driver's meeting. While the qualification matches starts in the afternoon. On the second day, the qualification matches will end around noon, and the final matches will start. Most likely after day 1, teams will be able to know if we have a chance to get qualified for worlds.
In our first day of competition, we did good and won all qualification matches while obtaining the AWP points, placing us at rank 1 in qualification. We got a score of 168 in driver skills and 124 in autonomous at the end of the day. The judges also interviewed us for the judging process.
At that rate, what we have to do is to continue scoring high in qualification and get a higher score in autonomous skills. There is also a possibility that the judges will come again to interview us for the second time.
I spent some time at night improving our programming skills route and strategy. I also added some fool proof program to prevent the robot from getting stuck.
We ended up ranking 2nd in qualifications and 4th in skills. We weren't able to score high in autonomous mainly because me and another teammate didn't perform well in skills match loading. However, our driver skills score broke our own record with 184 points. The judges also came to ask some questions regarding our robot.
In finals, we selected 66994A as our alliance partner, and we got tournament champion. This means we are qualified for worlds!!!! I am surprised yet delighted that we are able to go to world championship in our first year of competition, and I will try to do my best to prepare for worlds.
