Texas Torque competed at the Alamo Regional in San Antonio this past weekend. We were seeded first and chose teams 624- CRyptonite- and 457- Grease Monkeys- as our alliance partners. The team had an undefeated streak in qualifying matches, but was unfortunately defeated in the third round of semifinals. In a competition filled with 61 incredibly competitive teams, the stands were filled with energy consistently, whether teams won or lost. We again took home the prestigious Industrial Design award sponsored by General Motors.
Category: Competition
Texas Torque at the Bayou Regional
16 students from Texas Torque traveled to The Big Easy this past weekend to compete at the Bayou regional competition. At the end of qualifying matches, 1477 was seeded seventh out of 54 teams. Proving we can still push ourselves further as a team, we scored a total of 336 points in teleoperated mode- a massive improvement from the Lonestar Regional only two weeks earlier. As an alliance captain, Torque chose 456 Siege Robotics and 442 Redstone Robotics as our partners. We played competitively in the elimination rounds but were eventually eliminated in the second round of semifinals. However, we were excited to leave New Orleans with the Industrial Design award sponsored by General Motors.
Texas Torque at Lone Star Regional 2013
Texas Torque again attended the Lone Star Regional during the 2013 competition season. After some technical difficulties on Thursday, Texas Torque began picking up steam on Friday and thanks to the drive team’s skill were the only undefeated team at the end of the day. On Saturday, however, one of our opposing alliances managed to sneak some extra points and brought us down to the number two team in the final rankings. The quarter-finals were intense, but after suffering another set of communication errors, we were eliminated after the second quarter-final match. Even though we were disappointed at the loss of the regional, Texas Torque won the “Rockwell Automation: Innovation in Control Award” bringing our spirits up. Now that we know what we need to be working on, Texas Torque is ready to come back with an even more powerful bot at the Bayou Regional!
2013 Season- Week 6 Update
We have been very productive so far in this build season. We have several prototypes we are considering for the final design including intake, shooter, and a climbing mechanism. We have completed the CAD of the field as well as the construction of the practice field. Intake has become a top priority for the CAD team. While the mechanical team works diligently on perfecting our shooting mechanism, the programming team configures tracking software. We’re hoping to have both Bravo and Charlie robots completely constructed by the end of the building season.
2013 FIRST Challenge
This year, the FIRST FRC challenge is titled Ultimate Ascent. “ULTIMATE ASCENT SM is played by two competing alliances on a flat, 27 x 54 foot field. Each Alliance consists of three robots, and they compete to score as many discs into their goals as they can during a two (2)-minute and fifteen (15)-second match. The higher the goal in which the disc is scored, the more points the Alliance receives” -FIRST Website. We are looking forward to the competition this year as we start to build our 2013 robot. The complete rules for this year’s challenge can be found at http://frc-manual.usfirst.org/viewItem/3. We hope to see fellow teams and supporters at our first competition, the Lonestar Regional.
Texas Torque at the Houston Robot Remix
At the first annual Houston Robot Remix, our team not only hosted the event, but also competed. Seeding 3rd in the qualifying rounds, Texas Torque formed an alliance with teams 3847 and 3999 for the elimination bracket. In our first and second match we faced the 6th seed alliance and won to advance to the semifinals. However, in the third and fourth riveting matches we faced an unfortunate loss. While we scored higher in basket points we did not score any bridge points, which proved to be the determining factor. Team 4589 from Kingwood,TX used our secondary robot and was a finalist. They started a team this year and wanted to participate in the event though they lacked a robot of their own. We were happy to help a fellow team and look forward to hosting the competition next year.