DEWBOT V Bridgewater Battle

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6-June-2009

Team 1640 performed well at the first Bridgewater-Raritan Battle Royale (BR)2 competition, placing 3rd out of 18 in the qualifying rounds. We won 5 of our 6 qualifying matches. These matches were played with (2) robot alliances (and, of course, just 2 trailers). The game was further modified in that (6) Empty Cells were placed in the Outposts; so potentially (6) Super Cells could be put into play by the corner human player (just one such player per alliance, as the other was by necessity in the Outpost).

We modified our strategy to suit the game and focused on delivering Empty Cells to our human player (Matt). We shot the Empty Cells in. Matt scored (5) Super Cells during the day. He is clearly 1640's superhuman player.

We led the 3rd Alliance during playoffs. Alas, we were eliminated early on.

Woodie Flowers attended the competition and awarded the teams with trophies commemorating our participation in the 1st Bridgewater Battle.

Murph served as shooter operator for the first time in competition. She was great.

Carly drove. Carly loves to push opposing robots around.

Mike Rizzo served the competition as Head Referee.

We learned our drive-train does need some pit attention (the robot has been busy in demos of late). Two important pit points noted:

  1. A couple of the front/rear wheel axles are a little short and can slip out of their bearings. This needs to be checked regularly and bearing blocks adjusted if necessary.
  2. We never put a jam nut on the 7th wheel cylinder shaft. This had unthreaded itself to the point where the 7th wheel was in contact with the crater surface even when inactive. Pit regularly needs to confirm about 1/8" gap under the 7th wheel or adjust to achieve this (no big, but needs to be done).

The modified spindle drive worked well. Its greater speed enabled our revised strategy.

Bridgewater-Raritan Battle Royale Photo Gallery