Yesterday we won our very first match, which was a good start to the competition. Last night we replaced some broken cables that gave us electronic issues in the first match, which were fixed from then on. Today we were set to have another 5 out of our 11 matches. We arrived early to prepare for our matches and quickly claim a spot at the practice field to iron out our autonomous program.

Match 2
At 09:00 AM the matches were ready to start again. Our first match was together with team 3189 Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly from Wyoming. We opted not to run our autonomous as we had some last moment issues with it and thought it would be safer not to. Still, we were able to make a comeback in the driver-controlled period, winning the match with a one-point difference of 168 against 167!

Match 3
Before our next match started we quickly fixed our autonomous program, to not leave so much points behind. Our third match started great, with our autonomous program scoring the pre-loaded cone and parking in the right zone. But right when we were ready to start driving, the robot disconnected! This really came as a surprise, as we never encountered this so much when testing before worlds. After a while we were able to get the robot back online, but unfortunately it left our intake unusable. Our alliance partner 23114 Sabah tried their best but without us being able to assist, we unfortunately lost the match 70 against 179. Luckily this was our last match before lunch, and we had enough time to sort out our connection issue. An FTA followed us to our pit and told us that it’s a common issue with the MR battery connectors and helped us fix it!

Match 4
After the break we were ready to get back to the competition for match 47. Together with team 18527 PCM Alchemists we took up two strong teams, one that has been participating since 2007! We put in our best efforts, but were up against some really impressive robots and lost 187 against 309.

Match 5
So far, we were 2-2. In our fifth match we were joined by team 14212 Metrobotics. There was some confusion about penalties on both ours as the opponents side, but with good scoring in both autonomous as tele-op, we ended up winning with 203 against 149! Since we were able to iron out any issues in the earlier matches, our points were on an upswing. The same was true for match 6.

Match 6
After our last match, we met with our alliance partners for the last match of the day, 17692 RO2D2. Their 1+10 autonomous was their most stable program – this means that they’ll score their pre-loaded cone, and empty both of the cone stacks on either side of the field, meaning all we have to do is park. Because we had some time to prepare, we quickly wrote out a new autonomous program that only parks in a safe spot away from their robot. Our adaptability and communication with other teams has always served us well in the competition. We had some time for practice and knew this match would fare us well.

The match started and it was really impressive to see our autonomous work together so well right away. This also started our match off well with 75 points! Driver-controlled period went equally smooth and with good teamwork and coordination we were even able to score a circuit in the end-game. We ended the game with 263 points against 212! This was our personal highscore and favorite match, as everything came together and we had both a great autonomous and driver period.

After the matches were done, we met with all the Dutch FIRST teams from FLL to FTC and FRC. After a group picture, we went to a local food hall where we ate together and talked through our experiences over the past days. We had a great time and were ready to start competing again tomorrow!