At the North Star Regional, FIRST Team 1816 won the Regional Chairman’s Award, the highest-honor FIRST confers on teams. This award, as FIRST states, “honors the team that, in the judges’ estimation, best represents a model for other teams to emulate, and which embodies the goals and purpose of FIRST.” The Green Machine is proud to represent the highest-ideals of FIRST, reaching out within our community and beyond to spread Gracious Professionalism and enduring interest in science, technology, engineering and STEM. Our Chairman’s Award video was shown at the competition, and we have posted it here.
When it comes to the robot Zephyr itself, she is proving herself to be one sleek robot, maybe one of the best robots we’ve built in our seven years as a FIRST team. At the Lake Superior Regional, she handled the mid-field bump and balanced well on the mid-field co-opertiton bridge numerous times. We were picked to be with the 8th alliance, even though our seeding points placed us 26th. Although we did not move ahead from the quarterfinals, we were happy with our performance. Off the field, Team 1816 won two awards, Best Website and Entrepreneurship, which requires teams to compile and present a business plan.
Next stop was the North Star Regional, which takes over Mariucci Arena at the University of Minnesota. A change of wheels and Zephyr once again proved capable and flexible, whether scoring baskets or bridge balancing. Zephyr scored almost every basket attempted. During autonomous (when the robot moves independently of a human driver), Zephyr nailed 2 top tier shot baskets almost every time. Not to mention one match where our alliance won because we made a last-second shot from mid-field! Thank you to FIRST Team 3277-ProDigi for sharing video of this exciting last-possible-moment basket! It’s even been posted on a sports website in Lithuania. These exciting moments were made possible by some very accurate programming. We were picked by the 1st-seed alliance, and Zephyr did marvelously through to the Final match in the Final round. We lost to the 2nd-seed alliance, led by the 2011 World Champions Team 111-WildStang. The thrills of the competition continued, as we again won for Best Website and for our Business Plan, in addition to the Chairman’s Award.