Vex Robotics Team

Vex Robotics Team travel to World Championships in Dallas, Texas

The PNBHS Vex Robotics team travelled to Dallas, Texas, over the period 17 April to 27 April. There were 440 teams at this event - 396 teams in the Secondary School tournament and 32 teams in the University Challenge World Championship. The teams came from 14 different countries and 29 different US states making this a true world championship event. New Zealand had 16 teams qualify to attend (coming from 11 different Secondary Schools).

The game for this year's world champs, was called 'Clean Sweep'. It is played on a 12 foot by 12 foot field. It is a game played by two alliance partners competing against another two alliance partners. It consists of 20 seconds of autonomous robot action, and two minutes of driver control. As alliance partners are rotated throughout the course of the qualification rounds, it is essential to help any and all robots, as this effectively will help you. The Vex term is 'Gracious Professionalism.' Clean Sweep requires the alliance partners to 'move' regular balls and 'rugby balls' from their side of the field to their opponent's side. Any balls remaining on your alliance side of the field when the game is complete are scored against you. An animation of the Clean Sweep game can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBnLxyzKqtI

The team spent several days in Los Angeles, getting over jet lag and visiting local attractions like Disneyland, before pushing through to Dallas for the World Championships. Once in Dallas there was just enough time to see the John F. Kennedy Museum before the Championships got underway.

The Vex World Champs are held in one part of the Dallas Convention Centre, this particular section being around one kilometre long (the Americans like things big over there). The pit areas are full of life with many Puerto Rican, Mexican and Indian sambas winding their way (noisily) through the pit area and many teams in 'costume'. Our pits were one street over from New Zealand Street, the pit area that contained almost all the New Zealand teams. The atmosphere was terrific. At one stage, we were visited by R2D2 (the Star Wars character), while many teams were swapping scouting information about their robots, as well as various buttons, pins and stickers.

The first day of competition was a good one, with a parade of nations in the opening ceremony, the first practice match and the first qualification match (both being wins to the team). This meant the team went home that night on a high. The atmosphere, combined with the new sensations and experiences, meant we all had a good night's sleep.

The second day of competition, however, was not so successful. After initial testing for the day, we discovered that part of our scooping mechanism was running at half power - this meant we couldn't lift balls up to our basket mechanism and then get them off our side of the field. Several games were lost while we hunted the mystery problem down, playing our matches with a defective robot. We eventually traced the problem back to kinked electrical cables and a suspect connector block in the microcontroller (brain) of the robot. After replacing the entire electrical system, we were back in the hunt, even if it was the last game of the day. Unfortunately, no one mentioned this to our alliance partners, who proceed to ram our robot and block us from getting to any of the balls on our side of the field. Remember this was our own alliance partner for this round of the qualification matches. Needless to say our mood was rather downcast at the end of the day. We found out the next day that one good point of this day was that our score from the Driver Skills challenge was inadvertently credited to the Robot Programming Skills challenge; from this we ended up coming 8th in the world for our programming skills.

That night we went out to 'Gaters' for tea. Several of the team sampled Alligator. Not a bad meal. It definitely gave us something to gnaw on as we pondered the day.

The third day of competition went much better for the team. The team was presented with their New Zealand representative medals before the first match of the day. The first match resulted in a win, which lifted the team spirits somewhat. The second match of the day looked to be ours on paper as the alliance partner (a Mexican team) had already gained many wins in the tournament. Unfortunately, when the game started, the Mexican robot remained stationary, as it did throughout the rest of the match. This lead to a rather lopsided match; with the resulting score line. This was the last match of qualifying, and would prove to be our last match of the tournament, as we were not selected as an alliance partner for the quarter and semi-finals. This had an upside as we were able to enjoy some very close and stimulating matches from the grandstand.

The finals were held in the main auditorium of the Dallas Convention Centre (a circular auditorium which easily held all the teams from the pit area). The noise was deafening, with the Puerto Ricans, Mexican and New Zealanders going off. The New Zealand teams were invited to do a haka as the introduction to the next season's game unveiling.

As most readers would have seen from the news, two of the three teams that made up the World Championship winning alliance came from New Zealand (Auckland Home Schooler and Kristen College) What you didn't see was one of the Massey University teams nearly become world champions as well, only to be robbed by one of the opponent teams pulling a battery out of one of their robots in the third and deciding match of the championship. New Zealand won championships in other categories as well; Rangitoto College won the Autodesk CAD digital prototyping category, Free Range Robotics won for their website design.

After the finals, the team relaxed at the after match, which had a band using tesla coils to help generate tones of their music. One of the members of the band was performing using the sparks from the tesla coils.

The trip home was a massive day - thirty one hours on the road by the time we reached Palmerston North. During this time, the team had a ride to the airport in a 21 seat limousine, experienced the homeless of LA, saw a vending machine that had everything a young student might ever want, been through a flight with 90 other KIWIBOTS, and been on TV. A truly enjoyable and memorable journey.

The team would like to thank some of its sponsors who helped make this trip happen: Inspire.Net, IPENZ Manawatu and Noske-Kaiser, who kindly produced the aluminium 'botbox' which carried our robot safely to and from the world championships. And, lastly, the team also takes the time to thank the Mums and Dads of the team, whose financial contributions, on very short notice, allowed each of the team to travel; it is very much appreciated