Team 449

History of the Blair Robot Project

The Blair Robot Project, based in Silver Spring, MD, was founded in 2000 and has competed in FIRST every year since, except in 2005. In 2004, our team was part of the three-team alliance that won the Chesapeake Regional Competition. Unfortunately, most of our members were seniors and graduated in 2004, leaving us with too few experienced members to compete in 2005 or to do particularly well in 2006. In 2007, though our robot did not rank that highly, we are proud of how well we designed our robot, which had the capability of performing very well. We were able to demonstrate this capability at the Battle 'O Baltimore, an unofficial FIRST event held in August, where we placed place fourth out of 20 teams in the qualifying matches.

Last year we competed in two regionals of the 2008 FIRST Robotic Competition, FIRST Overdrive. At the New Jersey Regional, we were seeded 12 out of 63 teams and were picked by 1089, with 1676 rounding out our alliance for the quarterfinals. Unfortunately after winning a match against 103, 25, and 381, we lost our next two matches, putting us out of the elimination tournament. However, we are proud of how well we did and were lucky enough to win the Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology" Award for our design features. We continued to play well at Chesapeake, this time making it into the semifinals, with the help of our alliance captain 2234 and team 341. Despite the strong play of our alliance, our stint in the elimination tournament came to an end when our potentiometer was broken off of our shaft, rendering our ball manipulation system unusable in the semifinal matches.