It was the LigerBots’ show at the start of our first 2018 competition, the New England FIRST North Shore District Event, at Reading Memorial High School. LigerBots CTO Cameron played the national anthem on his trumpet, and we had the pleasure of watching our award-winning safety animation projected for the benefit of all 40 teams present.

Then the robot action began! We competed with our 2018 robot, Chronos, in 12 qualification matches and moved on to the playoffs along with the other top 23 teams.

We had some trouble in our first couple of qualification matches–Chronos tipped over in the first match after running into the Scale field element, and in our second match a wire came loose and we could not connect to our robot. After we fixed these problems we started doing exceptionally well, moving around the field very fast and placing a lot of Power Cubes on the Scale and Switch. We entered the playoffs in tenth place, and got picked by the sixth alliance, but were eliminated in the quarterfinals.

Our Chairman’s Award team gave a seven minute presentation for the FIRST judges, whose feedback was, “Excellent presentation. Keep doing what you’re doing.” 

We also talked to judges for technical awards in our pit, and to many young children who were at the event for FLL Jr. project presentations.

We had a close encounter with FIRST co-founder Woodie Flowers. A team member wearing our mascot costume had a chance to sign the shirt Woodie wears for that purpose at every competition, and then Woodie signed our mascot’s LigerBots shirt.

Over the weekend we acquired 32 district points that will help us move on to the New England FRC Championship in April. The LigerBots made three appearances on the field during the awards ceremony. We were formally presented with the 2018 world-wide FIRST Safety Animation Award. (Our Safety Animation will be played at all 160 FIRST Robotics competitions this season.)

The LigerBots also won the Imagery Award, which celebrates attractiveness in engineering and outstanding visual aesthetic integration of machine and team appearance.

Coach Igor also advanced in the nominations for the Woodie Flowers Award, which recognizes an outstanding mentor who inspires and challenges students.

Now we are back in the shop, constructing ramps we may add to Chronos and improving the software for our autonomous mode. We are looking forward to competing again, at the Greater Boston District Event, in Revere on April 7 and 8, where we hope to gain enough district points to make it to the New England District Championship.

You can see the rest of our photos from the North Shore District Event on our Flickr page.