Every year, nonprofit organization For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology hosts youth robotics competitions for varying age levels, with a unique challenge every season. The highest age group competition, the FIRST Robotics Competition, runs its competitive season from January through April, with teams getting six weeks of robot build time before seven weeks of competitions before the world championships. At the Iowa Regional, a Week four competition, Team 167 Children of the Corn, the Iowa City community team, placed fourth in the playoff double elimination bracket and qualified for the world championships.
Making improvements to their robot after their first competition at the Minnesota Bluff Country Regional, the Children of the Corn came to the competition much better prepared and ready for the competition at the UNIdome and McLeod Center in Cedar Falls.
Throughout March 26 and 27, two alliances of three teams each competed to score foam balls called fuel into goals called hubs, fighting over a limited supply in limited time. To add to the challenge, the first 20 seconds of the match are fully autonomous, with drivers not allowed to influence the robot’s behavior in any way except for emergency stops. The first day was all practice matches, the second day was pseudo-randomly assigned qualification matches, and in the third and final day, the top seeded teams selected alliance partners via a snake draft.
During the qualification round, teams competed not just to win the match, but to hit specific scoring thresholds to gain bonus ranking points from a match. Each win granted teams three RP, 100 fuel scored was one bonus RP, and 360 fuel scored was another bonus RP. The average RP over all eight of a team’s qualification matches were used to determined their seeding for the playoff draft.
Team 167 seeded third in the qualification match with a 9-3-0 win-loss-tie record, and was the third alliance captain. Through the snake draft, they picked 5809 The Jesubots and 1997 STAGROBOTICS as their alliance partners for the playoffs.
In the playoff bracket, the third seed alliance lost to the sixth seed, eliminated the seventh and fourth seeds in the lower bracket, then was eliminated by the fifth seed, ending up in fourth place.
The best-of-three finals were between the first seed alliance of Team 2847 The MegaHertz, Team 4728 ROCORI Robotics and Team 10439 Wild Wires and the second seed alliance of Team 4646 Wildcard Robotics, Team 3928 Neutrino and Team 5557 BB-R8ERS. In the first match, the second seed was given a red card for a rule violation, giving the first seed the win. In the second and third matches, the second seed won, giving the event winner title to the second seed alliance.
At each event, the top three teams in terms of event points that haven’t qualified already are qualified for the FIRST Championship in Houston, Texas. Team 167 were awarded the Gracious Professionalism award for exceptional sportsmanship, and the event points through that award and their performance in the qualification and playoff stages netted them enough event points to rank third.
