2017 Day 5

This morning we got to Fry's Electronics right as they opened to acquire the parts we needed to fix our power case. We implemented the fix at the hotel, and made it to the TRANSDEC facility with 5 minutes to spare for our presentation to the judges. The presentation went well; the judges appeared to be especially impressed with our mechanical design.

We had a practice run at 1:45 pm, unfortunately it wasn't very productive because our computer was randomly restarting during the run. Afterwards we discovered it was due to the fact that our UPS battery wasn't working. We believe someone had forgotten to power off our main computer yesterday after shutting down the sub, which severely drained and damaged the battery. After replacing it with our spare, we were good to go for our semifinal run.

We had our second semifinal run at 3:45 pm, during which we were able to pass through the gate and hit the red buoy! The sub attempted to hit the other two buoys, but it looks like the AI timed out when trying to hit the green buoy, and we got caught on the red buoy's tether when going for the yellow buoy.

Later this evening, we found out we were selected for a wildcard slot tomorrow morning at 7:45 am, which means that we will be able to make another attempt at the course to improve our score. Our team has been reviewing our log files from our last run to see how we can modify our AI to be more robust in preparation for tomorrow!