We are a community FTC robotics team, based in Wilmington, Delaware that is on our second season currently. We were in the winning alliance for the Delaware State Championship in the 2023-2024 season and got second place for the Connect Award that year. But how did this all come about?

In September of 2023, team RoboSapiens #19889 was getting ready to start their season. At the time, they already had about 9 members. Then, they recruited about 10 new members, but they didn't really know what to do with all of them, as the member limit for an FTC team is only 12. Their solution was to create a new team, known as RoberriPi. 

The first few weeks of our existence were... chaotic. We spent way too much time developing a chassis and learning the coding language, Java. There were many challenges they had to face along the way. From buying new parts to designing a paper airplane to even just focusing and staying on task, the hardware team, considering it was our first year, had done an amazing job. Once we actually got a working robot, there was still much, MUCH more work to be done. Even more, there was only a few weeks until the state championship at that time. The software team had been working on the code to run the robot, and had almost completed the driver controlled code. The only problem was that they had not started the autonomous code yet.

For the last 2-3 weeks, the software team was working virtually non-stop, creating, testing, tuning, and tweaking the autonomous code, making sure everything worked smoothly. The software team finished the code the night before the competition. It was close. But it was all worth it.

The day of the competition, everything was going relatively smoothly. We got our table, got our gameplan, and everything was great. We were not prepared for what was about to happen. Our first match was against our sister team and another highly skilled high school team. We lost that, 220 - 106. Our second qualification match was with our sister team, and we won 201 - 118. After that we did pretty well, only losing 2 out of our 5 qualification matches.

We came 4th in qualifying, so we had the last pick for our alliance, if we wanted to have a chance at going to worlds, as only the winning alliance captain team gets to go to Houston for worlds. There were only 3 teams outside of the top 4 that were really good and would make us have a chance of winning and going to worlds, so we agreed to partner with our sister team, RoboSapiens. It was RoboSapiens and RoberriPi against 3 other alliances, all wanting to go to worlds.

First Semi-Final match: we lost, 105 - 155. We then realized this would be a lot harder than we thought it would be. Second match: we won, 154 - 88. We started to gain confidence and realized that, yeah, we can do this!
Third match: we won, 167 - 149. We were going to the finals.

We saw what we were up against. Two high school teams, both of them had been around for years and years. One of them was the 404th team ever created in the World. However, we knew that somehow we were going to do pretty well in those matches. What we didn't know, is that one of the only things that made our robot unique and made us get so many points, was in jeopardy. The finals are played in a best out of three format, like the semifinals.

First finals match: 3... 2... 1... GO! We started our autonomous program. It ran smoothly, scoring us a solid amount of points, added with RoboSapiens scoring, which scored us in the lead... for now. Next, was the teleop period. This is where everything went wrong. It started out fine, but after about 25 seconds we collided with another robot and our camera fell off. We thought we could keep going and nothing bad would happen, but we were so very wrong. When we started to move again, the camera wire shredded in the wheels, the robot short-circuited, and we were out for the match. We needed that camera. It was the only physical thing the autonomous program needed for it to run. Without it, we were going to lose.

By some miracle, team MOE (Miracle of Engineering) #365, had a camera. However, it had no protection, you could see the wires, the motherboard, and everything in it. Somehow it worked. For the next 10 minutes before the next match, we got to work. We removed the shredded camera, we rebooted the robot, we taped the new camera onto the robot, and it worked! We had time for one test of our auto program, and it worked perfectly, somehow, someway.

Second finals match. 3... 2... 1... GO! The camera worked! Our robot moved up, dropped the object on the line, and scored us 20 points! RoboSapiens did the same, so we were up to 40 points already. We dropped our object onto the board, but it landed in the wrong place. RoboSapiens' landed in the right place though, so that was another 20 points! We went on scoring what we could in that auto period, and in total we had 83 and the opposing team had 75. It was now up to the driver controlled part and endgame. After the first minute and a half of driver-controlled, we had scored 45 points. They had scored 63. We needed to do everything perfectly in the endgame.

We lined up to launch the paper airplane. 30 points! The best we could get! However, RoboSapiens' only got 10 points. The opposing robots lined up. One went too far and only got 10 points! The next one.... went off to the right! 0 points for that! Now all we had to do was hang our robot on the bar. We lined up and raised our robot off the ground. The other two robots had already done the same. The last 5 seconds. 5... 4... 3... RoboSapiens' robot comes off the ground! 2... 1...

Did we win? We waited impatiently for the judges to tally up the points. If we won this, RoboSapiens' would go to worlds and we would have been in the winning alliance in our rookie season. The score: 188 by the opposing side and... 218 by our team!! We won!! "It was one of the most challenging, fun, and exhilarating moments of my life that day." - Carter Wilke, Robot Controller 1. Not only had we won with our sister team, but we also had been in the winning alliance our first year and had gotten 2nd place on the Connect Award! All of that hard work, all of the time we spent, all worth it. 

Thank you for reading all of this, it's all true and this took about 2.5+ hours to write.

Thank you to MOE for the camera, thank you to RoboSapiens for this opportunity, and thank you to the entire FIRST community for your hard work, dedication, and love for the future of STEM.