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Last year(when I did robot arm) my base had 2 6v batteries, a 12v battery, servo controller, power distribution board, optoisolater, vacuum pump, servo for a pneumatic valve, and some various tubes for the vacuum system

National tournament height task results, in centimeters:
356
211
110
92
83
77
67
62
49
35
0 for everyone else.

Two perfect scores, disregarding height task.
Four only missed ping pong ball in the north zone.
Not sure why so many less perfect scores than last year, maybe the moved target boxes challenged more than I expected. Or the height task distracted the teams from getting perfect scores first.

Top results did not exactly match height task.

Top scores clearly distinquised by height task.
Tie breakers took care of the rest with objective measures.

The arms that scored for the height tasks met the rule, some were very creative. No questionable arms even tried to score for one reason or another.

The basic arms themselves had more variety than last year.

Overall the competition was good from my perspective. I hope the competitors enjoyed the day too.

Regards,

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI

Hmm, the moved target boxes probably had some effect since that adds just that much more time to each action. Did any of those teams that did the height bonus not get prefect score because of some mistake that disqualified an item? Or did they just choose to do the height task?

I think many teams were distracted with the height task and didnt focus on practicing as much. I saw pretty much every run except the first hour, and I think alot of the mistakes I saw were a result of not practicing until the actions are automatic.

Congrats to placing teams

Was the 1st place team also the team with the highest height score?

Yes

Yeah, winning team had a score of 100.12. I believe 2nd place was a 95.8 ish. As in most teams with a height task didn't have a perfect score. Congrats to all teams, I saw a bunch of really awesome arms yesterday and was particular impressed with new trier's arm. Really cool gripper and ping pong ball retriever.

With the end of the season, I encourage people to post pictures on the image gallery of robots, gravity vehicles etc that you worked on. It helps alot with new teams/students to have some small starting point knowing the varity of different solutions to innovate from.

I'm uploading a video to youtube currently that a friend of mine took at the national competition. If you have any questions feel free to ask them here or on youtube. I think the only thing thing that is somewhat confusing is the whole scoring a point by rotating the arm into the north zone.
Plus I took a pvc pipe out of a goal box and then rotated it into the north zone to score a point then put it back into the goal box. It wasn't planned, I was supposed to score that point at the beginning of the run. Though I stilled ended up scoring a point and all worked out. Plus I took my time scoring points, since so many of the top teams had made mistakes throughout the day I decided to take it pretty slow. I would also like to point out that our height task is capable of consistently getting 5m and we can push it up to 6-6.5m but it begins to lose stability up that high. At nats I stopped it at 3.5 ish meters. Both due to taking my time on the run and not really wanting to go higher, since I happened to be the 3rd to last run of the day (I knew most of the scores and how high I needed to go inorder to get first).

http://youtu.be/bmrTGYAvwH4

*does some quick in-head math*
Ok, i think a perfect score without raise is... 94
subtract 1 for the raise of the ball and add on the 110cm...

ok, our team (3rd place) should have had 95.2 points. I'll probably get corrected at some point