TIA-didn’t-Go – sorry for that joke – at least for our navigation when trying to follow a straight line on this last day. Just like we did after the evening events, but with the unpleasant side effect that he didn’t recover in the morning of the finals day.
As promising as our tests were looking out to be the day before (with Pick and Pack successfully finding and gripping items from shelves, Items being socially acceptably delivered without hesitation and doors being opened and closed left and right), we sadly couldn’t carry that momentum over to the scored final run. When we woke up, we had to realize that our ever existing issue of missing traction came to a critical point, where our navigation failed because of the massive drifting when the robot was trying to move. In a last ditch effort to save Erik’s Final run (he was the first Episode of the day with SAID) we tried to clean the tires with alcohol to regain some softness and therefore grip on the slippery floor. But without much success as it has shown. leaving us in second place in SAID.
After the SAID run, we had some hope left in TTD as the other teams hadn’t been able to pass through the door until that point, and Lukas was still able to unlock the handle with the robot being in its non-moving state. But it was too little too late, he managed to equal Team Cranfield in score and win over them by timing decision, but the Team from Bonn then managed to pass through the door. This meant that, because only the final run was counted, they won the episode by score.
Similar things unfolded in SPAP, as the score would have been at least equal if TIAGo could have driven to search for the items, but because we could only grip while standing still, Cranfield ran away with the episode with 1 point in front of us because of the searching action.
All in all, the competition was a valuable experience for us as a team, and we met a lot of friendly faces along the way. Sometimes luck just isn’t on your side, but that can happen to anyone in a comp!
Better luck next time, Team Homer