F1nite

CVR Recap

Far overdue Also I changed the blog name: Whirlpool of Water --> F1nite (see my old blog on substack for details)

Around 2 weekends ago, my robotics team participated in the Central Valley Regional, under the First Robotics Competition. Essentially, robots this year picked up weird donut shaped objects and shot them into a place up high and a weird slanted place, in order to receive points. The alliance (team of 3 robots) that had the most points won*.

* Won the match.

Some game mechanics

So how the competition works is like this. First, you load everything in on Thursday, then you get a day to rest and practice on Friday, Saturday and the first half of Sunday are what are called "Qualification Matches," and the latter half of Sunday is where some teams make their own alliances and those alliances compete to be the winner in a double elimination bracket.

The real meat and potatoes happens in the Qualification Matches. (Side Note: It is important to mention that a team cannot win individually, only an alliance can win. All matches being played are alliance v alliance (or 3 robots vs another 3 robots), and to distinguish robots, teams are either on the red alliance or the blue alliance). Qualification Matches are basically a heck ton of matches where

  1. an ordering** of best to worst teams becomes apparent
  2. Teams can watch other teams compete
  3. Most of the matches of the competition are played (hence why it's two days long)

I put asterisks next to "ordering" because a sad reality is that your schedule (or who you face during each match) is sort of random, meaning that you could get a very easy schedule (facing against lots of bad teams) or a very hard schedule (facing against top teams). Remember, teams compete in alliances. Usually, one team can't really solo carry an alliance, especially if they're playing against 3 competent robots. Furthermore, since there's nowhere near enough time for all possible alliances to play each other (teams only get ~9-12 matches), your ranking is heavily influenced by your match schedule. Sure, a good team does rank higher on average, but there is the real possibility that they rank super low, like team 1351 who just got a terrible schedule.

To add even more details to this ranking ordering thing, teams aren't even ranked by wins or losses or ties. They're ranked by these things called "ranking points," and the breakdown is as follows:

This makes crap even more complicated since sure winning is great, but to move up in the standings, you need to get ranking points rather than real points.

So how'd we do? Well on Sunday after all Qualification Matches, we were ranked fifth. What happens in FRC is a snake draft for alliance teams, and we ended up being the third alliance's captain, and ended up leading that alliance to the finals (we lost to madtown-bread)! This was pretty improbable, and overall our team had lots of fun competing (mostly because we were winning).

Yeah that's about it. I'll write another post for FRC-specific individuals where I just write as if I were talking to my teammate, using lots of FRC terminology. Stay tuned I guess