The AdamBots had yet another successful competition this past weekend at the Troy District at Troy Athens High School. Despite extremely tough competition from some of the best teams in Michigan, we were semifinalists and recipients of both the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Entrepreneurship Award and the Best Website Award for the third straight time.

On Friday, our primary driver, Alex Shultz, was at a welding competition and both Emily Bolewitz and Tanay Patel drove and helped maintain an excellent qualification match record. We finished Friday with 7 match wins and only 2 losses.

Meanwhile, the Programming Team was working feverishly between matches and whenever they could get the robot to get a working autonomous mode. They had to overcome several obstacles throughout the year, but stuck with it, and persevered. Just before the elimination rounds on Saturday, they got it working. Congratulations to Steven Ploog, Jason Merlo, Ben Bray, and their mentors Mrs. Keithly, and Mr. Shultz. In the elimination rounds, our alliance was one of three alliances capable of putting three tubes up in autonomous and possibly the only #4 seeded alliance in the nation that could at all.

On Saturday, we finished the qualification matches by winning 2 matches and losing 1, culminating in an overall 9-3 qualification match record. At the conclusion of the qualification matches, we were ranked #5 for the elimination round selection and after the #1 team picked the #4 team, we moved up and eventually became the #4 alliance captain. We chose team #226, the Hammerheads and team #244, one of the three Robodawg teams.

In the quarterfinals we faced a challenging #5 seeded alliance of teams 910, 68, and 3115. At the beginning of the first quarterfinal match, we fell backwards on our back and were immobile for the rest of the match in which we went on to lose, 39-79. The following matches, however, our luck changed and we won both matches, 98-77 and 110-52.

Troy District Semifinalists, Entrepreneurship and Best Website Awards

In the semifinals, we played the #1 seeded alliance comprised of teams 2337, 469, and 3548. We lost two straight matches 127-74 and 129-86, but scored a substantial amount of points.

We also won the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Entrepreneurship Award and the Best Website Award. This was the first time the team has ever won the Entrepreneurship Award and the 6th time (3rd this year) in the past 4 years that the team has won a Best Website Award. Congratulations to both the Project Management Team and the Marketing & Website Team.

Related Media: 2011 FIRST Troy District Pictures

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