My son’s robotics team achieved a personal best in the Silicon Valley regional today, placing eighth in the qualifying rounds (out of 60 teams). My son worked on a neural network that ran on the NVIDIA GPU to recognize the yellow boxes (once a second to conserve power) and a motion tracker to interpolate between the samples.
The eighth-place placement unfortunately matched them against the perennially top-seeded Cheesy Poofs for the quarterfinals. Then we had what I might call a “4904 Error” — communication with the bot went haywire, knocking us out for this year.
Here’s a sample match from the qualifying rounds. There are three cooperating robots on each side. We have paired up with the Thunder from Down Under (in from Australia), and you can see one robot lift two robots off the ground at the end for bonus points.
Shooting a yellow box up onto the big see-saw. When the see-saw is tilted our way, we earn 2 points per second.
The flat panel on the left side can lift a teammate’s robot off the ground for bonus points at the end (serving the collective instead of climbing up ourselves; the original design had a lifter on each side, but we busted the weight budget).
And in the team pit, doing repairs and recalibrating between matches. SW team in the back.. 
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