Third Preliminary Mission, something beyond Murphy’s law

Today at 9:30 am we had the third team leader meeting in which Adam talked about the results of his last session (at last night) with executive and technical committees of Rescue Robot League. The most important one is that “The teams are allowed to only request TEAM RESET NOT ROBOT RESET”! This means if ONE of a group of your robots needs reset, you should return ALL the robots to the start point! So the multi-robot teams (almost all teams) won’t be able to request reset if their autonomous robot(s) doesn’t go where they supposed to go – this technique is widely used by multi-robot teams like us. Anyway, our third mission was a very disappointing end to our preliminaries. Since we didn’t score any victim in our previous missions, we had to find around 4 victims. So we decided to climb up a very steep staircase having two victims (most teams refused to go there). BETA climbed up it perfectly but at the final step, Mehdi a little bit turned the flippers which led to flipping over from a 1.5m height!!! Mehdi intelligently could flip back the robot using its flippers but Alireza (Amini) informed me about the smell of smoke around the robot. I asked reset and we understood the powering system of our robot is badly damaged! As a result we missed the general competitions and we should only concentrate on the best of class missions. Hopefully we’ll have a better chance in remaining days!