Day One of Kentwood Competition - Load In

At 3:30 PM today we set off for East Kentwood High School in Kentwood Michigan. We estimated 90 minutes of travel, but the weather was not cooperative. The wind was blowing badly and it slowed the Jeep and trailer down to a maximum of 60 MPH so it took us just over two hours. We checked in at the Hotel first, dropped off our stuff and non-essential personnel and headed on to the school. Load in was fairly easy. They did not have any decent signage to mark how to get to the drop off door. To their credit, they provided a couple really nice maps, however the maps were zoomed out too far to really see where roads and parking lots were. Plus they were satellite photos of a beautiful summer day and it's March in Michigan. The giant snow piles make things look a little different.

We reached our pit and were able to unbag the robot about 6:30. Things went fairly well after that. We had a couple electrical issues to update but that only took a few minutes. We were really hoping to get some drive time in and maybe even a practice match, however the inspectors felt we had several rough and sharp edges that needed to be filed down. Unfortunately that took us quite a while to resolve. We also discovered our Autonomous programming needed to be adjusted because of the difference in friction cause by the carpet in the arena. This is just one of those things you can't plan for. You have to go to an event and take things for a test drive. We made a change to the code and will test it first thing in the morning.

Tomorrow will be a big day. We're all really excited!