Competition Day - May 8, 2000
I was seeded round 20, table 1, red-plate, against Nick Kulkarni. David Gandy was my driver.
Dave started with the front against the wall. He backed up into the corner of the puck/ball alignment (picture #1) and just started plowing. He pushed whatever was in his path down the slope (picture #2). At the 30 seconds mark, the asteroid was released, and guess who was there to get it? Dave started pushing it around, and managed to push it down the slope just on the edge of the hole (picture #3), the audience was going wild. I asked him, "You going to get it?" He said, "Hell, yeah." I was a little shaky about this idea since I had flipped over once while going down the slope. But Dave knew better.
On the way down, the front end caught on the bottom surface and seemed to be stuck. Dave tried some back and forth action with the motors. Still a little stuck. Out of desperation, I turned the spinner, and low and behold, the 'bot came down. It went on to push the asteroid in. Dave and I did a little high five celebration while the UA behind us was saying, "Keep on going!!" She didn't realized that I was already disqualified.
Anyway, Dave tried to pull off a last minute move by advancing to the lower level balls, but time ran out. Amazingly, I pulled off 5.6 lbs, probably one of the top five or six scorers. My opponent, who should have had a free ride, failed to get any balls in and the match ended in a double loss.
I must say, I didn't use the robot in the way I had designed for it. But it certainly scored very high, probably much higher than what I would have scored if I had used the spinner like I had planned. All the credit goes to Dave, who did an excellent job driving. I guess all the video-gaming pays off sometimes.
Bit more caption on the photos. You can see my opponent on the first two pictures. You also get a shot of John McBean on the second picture. The third picture shows Dave and most of me. As you can see, Dave is really into it, and is just cruising along. The last picture was taken just after Dave had pushed in the asteroid. As you can see, Dave has his hand raised. The audience was all excited. I was very impressed......
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