We tried our best to get the whole team to the qualifier, but unfortunately, we had to settle for sending our drivers/builders, lead programmer to fix any last-minute issues, and the lead presenter. Leaving the rest of the team back in Puerto Rico was not an easy choice, but it was one that had to be done. Our participation in the games is dedicated to all the students of the Benito Cerezo School that could not travel with us. They all worked really hard and enabled us to participate.

Traveling from Puerto Rico to DC comes with its difficulties, starting with the cost. Washington DC is not a popular destination from Puerto Rico, so there are no direct flights. Our trip had a connecting flight, and considerable layover time. That itself makes everything more complex, since now we have to spend money for food in the airport, there could be canceled flights, delays, etc. Also, having a connecting flight increases the possibilities of the robot not getting to the final destination on time, and that would be a disaster! But we didn’t have options. We went to DC against all odds!

We discovered that traveling with a robot is not easy. First thing is that the robot is quite large. Almost 18 inches on each side. We needed a big box. A big toolbox was the obvious option. There are toolboxes that can fit the robot easily. However, the exterior size of those boxes was too large and not accepted by the airline. Another option was to make a wooden box just the right size, about 20″x20″x20″. That would fall within the airline requirements of a regularly sized baggage. We found a really good article made by FTC team 3491 (Fix It) that includes a PDF of how to build the box, but making a wooden box takes time that we could use to make the final adjustments to the robot… The last option was to split the robot in two and put it in a smaller box. Our mentor found a reasonably sized tool box in The Home Depot that was big enough to fit the robot in pieces, and small enough to pass as oversized baggage. We purchased some 2″ foam to use as padding, put the robot parts inside with some extra padding in between them and wished it luck! The downside of doing this is that then you need to put the robot back together, but fortunately our robot is quite modular, as the slider can be separated from the chassis by removing only five bolts, and then the gripper can also be separated from the slider by removing only four bolts. Motor and servo connections were made to facilitate their removal, so that was not a problem either.

And there goes all of our work, in the hands of JetBlue! Thankfully, everything went well, and we got there!

DC 1 Qualifier

The qualifier was held in the District of Columbia International School. There was a table waiting for us, which we quickly decorated with the beautiful flag of Puerto Rico, some Puerto Rican candies, the team’s name and, off course, our robot.

We started practicing right away. We noticed that our autonomous code was a little bit off, probably because of dimensional differences between the official field and our DIY field. Our programming team leader quickly modified it to improve it’s accuracy.

While this was done, the robot was taken to inspection, which it passed without problems.

After this, the robot was taken to the judges for the interview. Unfortunately, pictures are not allowed in the interview rooms. The judges were very interested to know more about our outreach and fund-raising efforts, which included several school visits, show-and-tell presentations, radio interviews, reaching people through our social media accounts, having several sales to raise funds, and visiting several possible sponsors.

Then the games started!

These are official scores. As you can see, we did really well. After all the games were done, we ranked 6th place. Then it was time for the Playoffs. Something we didn’t know, being new to the presential games, is that top ranked teams select other teams to be in their alliances. We were surprised that the team in the second position (Team Vector) selected us as their first choice! We played really well with really good partner and opposing teams. Ultimately, the opposing alliance won.

Then came the awards, and we received the Judges Choice Award for our exceptional outreach efforts.

DC 2 Qualifier

We also participated in the DC2 qualifier the next day. Our luck this time was not the same. Unfortunately, some of our assigned alliance partners confronted problems during their game, like getting stuck, accuracy issues, etc. We did our best to get afloat on our own, but the other teams were really good. We won two of our games and were ranked 9 in the qualifier. However, this day we made changes to our presentation speech and were able to really impress the judges. Our presentation meeting lasted about 40 minutes since the judges wanted to know more and more about our outreach efforts, all of our learning, code improvements, etc. We also were third place for the Inspire Award. The official results were not available at the time of this writing.

In summary, our team made a great performance, especially taking into account this was our first in-person participation. We had a good autonomous code that helped us achieve good points in the first 30 seconds, had excellent drivers that consistently played impeccable games against amazing adversaries, did a great job in our presentations, and finally took two awards home and got medals for the whole team back in the island. All of this surpassed our own expectations and left us willing for the next season to come already.

The Borikengineers will be back!

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