Day 4 – results and finals 2010-06-24

It wasn’t really a great surprise to find out that we were not in the finals. Our team’s fairly dismal performance assured this. There are a couple of reasons for this – one, that our robot is relatively weak, slow and blind. This we know. This we can improve on for the future.

The other reason is that both the luck of the draw and the way that the contest was structured were both badly against us. As our robot goes, it’s towards the lower half of the field, for sure. But we had the very bad luck to be set to play against three very strong teams on Day 1, 2 very strong teams and one weaker team on Day 2, and 2 very strong teams and one comparable team on Day 3. And playing repeatedly against the same very strong team on two days, when there were so many other teams that we would have loved to play, was just plain wrong. But that’s the way that the organisers chose to organise it, so all we can do is go with it. But it’s a disappointment for the boys, seeing Team Victory (with whom we had a very close match yesterday), having had a much easier set of matches to play than ours, making it into the finals, whereas we didn’t. Looking on the bright side, though, today is set aside for friendly matches for those teams who are not participating in the finals and the boys are attempting to arrange those now.