I am excited to update you on the Bedford High School Robotics teams success this weekend at the World FIRST Robotics Championship.  

The team left on Tuesday 4/21 for St.Louis.  On Wednesday morning, most of the team got in a little sight seeing at the Arch and City Museum, while the pit crew was allowed to bring in 5 team members to set up our pit.  At 5:00 PM the entire team was allowed in to finish inspections and practice matches.  

At the championship, there were 600 FRC  (FIRST Robotics Competition) teams split randomly into 8 divisions.  Each division had 76-77 teams.  We were randomly placed in the Archimedes Division.  

We had a rough first match, with some mechanical issues slowing us down.  Sometimes in the shipping things get shaken up a little.  The pit crew went right to work finding and fixing the robot.  This is the 5th event for our bot, so wear and tear are always a problem at worlds.  

We worked hard all day Thursday to raise our ranking and ended the first day of qualifications in 2nd.  By Friday morning, before our first match of the day, the 1st ranked team dropped below us.  From that point forward, we never fell out of first.  After all 127 qualifying matches were finished, we were in first with a sizable lead.  Our average score was 181.2 while the second seed team's average score was 158.0.  

Being in 1st gives us the advantage of picking any team in the division to play eliminations with us.  On Friday we had decided to pick team 2338, Gear It Forward, from Illinois as the first pick.  Though they were ranked 4, they were able to compliment our robot the best.  One thing our division lacked, was fast can grabbers that were consistent crate stackers as well.  This was our best choice.  They were awesome at getting crates from the landfill area, and making stacks of 6 crates with a recycling container on top.  Earlier in qualification matches we were able to score 236 with this team even though the third robot on our alliance was dead the whole match.  Knowing this allowed us to meet with this team on Friday night to create our pick list for our third and back up robot.  

As the first seed robot, we get to pick the first team, and then the picks serpentine, so we get the 24th pick and then the 25th pick for our back up bot.  For our 2nd pick, we selected team 3996 from Quebec, Canada.  Though the team's primary language was French, they had several students who also spoke a good amount of English and we were able to strategize with this team.  For our back up robot, we picked team 1089 from New Jersey.  Both of those picks were based on the ability to get recycling containers from the ledge.

Team Stats from the World FIRST Robotics Championship

Quarter finals 1 and 2 went very well and we remained the number 1 alliance, but a huge problem in our first semi-final match threatened to end our play.  On our first semi-final match, team 2338 and 1023 both had mechanical failures combined with some really bad luck.  One of our lifting parts broke, and our ramp was knocked down.  The score from that match was only 43 points.  To advance, we had to be one of the top two averages after playing 3 matches (one against each of the other 3 alliances).  It appeared to all that we were going to get knocked out at this level, however, our alliance battled back with an very high second score of 197, but we still didn't think it was enough.  We were currently in last place and needed to move to second place.  Many people wrote us out.  The strong alliance posted a division high and personal best score of 274 points in their third match, vaulting us up to 2nd place and advancing us to finals.  It was a scary hour, but in the end, the alliance put on a great show.  

In the finals, the tournament turns to winning 2 out of 3 matches, and we won the first two final matches by scores of 190 - 150 and 214 - 208.  The wins gave us the division title, and our 6th blue banner of the year.  (only one other team in the world has done that this year).  

Winning the division advanced us to the Einstein World Championship matches.  The champions of each division fought for the world title.  The competition for the center cans became more fierce and though our alliance partners did not have the speed to win the can war, we were still able to put up enough points to advance to the semi-finals!  Since the cans on the step (neutral zone) are multipliers for the stacks, it was vital to win them.  Though we were not able to get any extra cans, we gave our best and stacked over 200 points worth of stacks.  It just wasn't enough to advance to finals.  

In the end, we are so very excited to have finished as the fourth highest alliance in the world.  This is further than we had even hoped for when we started this season with a goal to get into the finals for the first time in our division.  

It has been a great season for Bedford Express, and we are happy to have been the highest placing Michigan team, and to have had such an amazing season.  Thank you for your support.