This is an official paper showing where we ranked in the Liberty Competition. Surprisingly there was also a raffle  held and many of our group members won prizes. I was fortunate enough to receive a small scholarship from the university.

Although we arrived late to the competition at Liberty University it went well. Our team made many improvements an we nearly made it to the semifinals round. As I mentioned before we made a spur of the moment decision and got help from one of the club programmers in order to change our two controllers to function as one controller. We also did not arrive to our matches late, which is definitely an improvement from the last competition.

                                          One last practice run before we head out to competition.

This what our current robot looks like. We were 460 D in both competitions and right before this we were about to pack up our supplies so we could travel to Liberty University.

While waiting for the next competition at Liberty University we came across another complication. It was something we had recognized before , but only decided to fix at this time. The front lifters were being held down by the weight of the claw. This caused them to drag a little and slow down the robot in the long run. WE thought about the best way to prevent this with out going against the restriction we had on the robot's size and weight and came up with a solution. We added more cross pieces directly under the lifters and they did not even add too much weight to the robot.

After altering the robot our robot had scissor lifters that were not off balance, and of course a claw that could capture more than on game piece at a time. We also had divided roles between our team and recognized that one of our Team mates should be the designated driver. And we decided to have a back up driver. Our one other team mate and I volunteered to be the coaches. Towards the end we attempted to try and all learn the basics in driving the robot , but since we had one person who drove the robot with more skill he tended to operate it better. Every time he was up also we had the back up driver as the person who steered the robot regardless. So there was always two people driving and one person coaching since we had two controllers. Until of course or last competition where we got help to reprogram the robot to have only one controller.

We had prepared for each of the two competitions to the best of our ability. The process in which you had to sign up for the competition and get your robot inspected became less foreign to us also after the previous competition. 

L.C. Bird Competition

As time went on we had to gear up for competition. Our first was held at home in the L.C. Bird Gymnasium. There was a problem with our lifters that we did not really recognize until after the competition. Scissor lifters have a lot to do with balance and ratios; if you have one slight difference in length of the individual components of the lifter this can cause the whole lifting mechanism to be tilted. Here is one of my classmates (our driver) getting our robot ready, and testing the controller and lifters exc. This competition at our high school was our first competition and mostly a learning experience. If I can recall our team scored the highest our of all of the teams from Bird . There were many complications during the competition, but in the end we survived. And got strict orders from one of our instructors to read the rule book.