Congratulations to the Kauaibots, as they just returned from another successful outing at the FIRST FRC Honolulu Regional Competition!
This year’s competition featured 36 Hawaii and 2 visiting teams (from New Orleans and Taiwan) and an exciting game: “Rebound Rumble”.
The Kauaibots’ robot, named “Thunder Chicken”, featured an autonomous mode which reliably dunked basketballs into the middle-tier hoops, a ball “vacuum” which swept up balls on the floor and into the shooting mechanism, and was designed for easy balancing on the court bridges.
“Thunder Chicken” made it into the quarterfinals, where the robot was paired with robots from Nanakuli and Hilo High. Although that was a far as the robot made it in the competition, the quarterfinals were a very exciting matchup against an alliance (which went on to place second in the finals) featuring great robots from perennial finalists Punahou School (Oahu) and McKinley High School (Oahu), and including the West Hawaii Exploratory Academy (Big Island). More information is available at the Hawaii Robotics Organizing Committee (ROC) website.
The Kauaibots were also awarded the Johnson & Johnson “Gracious Professionalism Award”.
The Kauaibots are meeting on Saturday, April 7 at 1:00 p.m. to begin preparing for next year’s season. The team always welcomes new volunteers, so if you’re interested in getting involved you can get contact info from the Kauaibots website.
I wanted to note that there was some technical trouble during the competition, that appears to be experienced by a number of other teams as well. Investigation is currently underway. The symptom is that communication between the driver station and the robot was either very slow or altogether non-functional, resulting in frustration for our drivers and the team overall. As we uncover more details about the root cause and the solution for this problem, I’ll keep everyone posted.