FRC Robotics Team 1746 "Otto" Ranks 5th in World

This season, the game was to collect cones and cubes on the field and arrange them on a rack to score points. More details can be found in the game manual, linked here: https://firstfrc.blob.core.windows.net/frc2023/Manual/2023FRCGameManual.pdf. Early on in the season, our robot performed well, but not nearly as well enough as it did later in the season or well enough to qualify for worlds. This is because in our first regional district competiton, we used a very slow and topheavy design, with a slow intake system to collect gamepieces as well as a really slow placing mechanism. Realizing our shortcomings, we took a leap of faith and began a full robot redesign in the two week time period we had until the next regional district competition. During this extremely stressed period, we completely changed our intake and placing system and consolidated it into one system that would both intake gamepieces and then later extend and place them on the scoring rack. This lowered our center of gravity by a huge margin, allowing for better maneuverability, as well as improved our scoring and intake speed due to fewer systems and internal steps the gamepiece had to undergo to get scored. This made our robot super competitive, as seen in the second regional district competition, even though we didn't win.

This year, both Georgia and South Carolina conglomerated into one singular district, making the competition much more fierce. In this competition, in light of our full robot redesign, we performed really well in our scoring times and maneuerability, going on to be picked for playoffs, where the top ten robots pick their teammate robots to play on their side in a double elimination tournament to single out the winning robot alliance. In playoffs, we managed to not lose a single match and come out as Georgia/South Carolina District Champions.

As a fruit of the success at the district championships, our team had qualified to compete at Worlds. This experience was truly something that I will never forget, and the spectacular events that happened are shown in the clip above where we would win our entire division (which was 1/8 of all teams at worlds) and then go on to the einstein tournament (which is a double elimination playoffs between all division winners) to rank 5th in the world.