On March 28-29th, our team, the Automatons, competed in the 2025 10,000 Lakes Regional, this year at the State Fair’s Lee and Rose Warner Coliseum.
On the day before the 10,000 Lakes regional competition, our team went immediately into inspection, testing our robot’s function, and pit scouting. We launched into practice matches, scoring coral after coral and even landing a climb in one of our matches. After tweaking a few setpoints and fixing a bug in our limelight cameras, we left the day confident in our bot’s capabilities for the competition.
Day 1 of the competition kicked off strong; we were winning match after match. Our autonomous routine rarely missed any coral placements, and our drive team sped through the game’s motions efficiently and accurately. Everything was running smoothly, with minimal required fixes in the pit between qualification matches. It wasn’t until Qualification Match 54 that we lost a match, though it came as no surprise–our opponents were two of the most highly-ranked and formidable robots in the competition. Regardless, when we were intaking coral from the feeder station, a coral fell into our climber (a hole in the middle of our robot) and we were forced to play defense for the rest of the match. Still, ending the day at Rank #7 left us confident for the next day ahead of us. Safe to say, seeing our robot at Rank #2 for most of the day felt pretty good.
The qualification matches on our second competition day were fairly straightforward: we stayed at Rank #7 and were captains of our alliance. By this point in the day, we anticipated a “scorched earth” scenario where the 1st alliance captain would pick another top 8 alliance captain, who would then decline the offer. We hoped that this would lead to either 2847 MegaHertz or 2491 NoMythic (two bots that we saw as the best in the competition) would pick us for their alliance. While this didn’t happen, we still chose two very capable robots that complemented our own.
Going into the playoffs, we immediately faced some unfortunate alliance matchups, where we faced the #3 alliance led by 2847, narrowly knocking us down to the lower bracket. Again, we faced a top alliance in our second match, resulting in our elimination from the playoffs. Nonetheless, our alliance performed impressively under the pressure.
While many team members were disappointed that this would be our last competition of the season, we’re proud of our improvement from the Lake Superior Regional until now, and we look forward to building bots again next year!