The bout started with Alain smashing both the bots with T-Wrex's tail. Each hit resulted in the victim flying high in the air and landing some distance away. The disadvantage of a multibot is that each individual bot gives up substantial weight to its opponent and Alain took full advantage of this. After one of the hits, one of the bots landed on its back and was disabled. Alain went after the other bot and in the process both T-Wrex and the remaining Raptor got entangled in the arena. At this point the bout turned into the 2000 presidential election. You will need to put on your lawyer hats to follow the action from this point forward.

Technically, since the bots were not entangled together, the referees should not have intervened, but one of the referees decided to call a time-out and free the two bots entangled in the arena. If this had not happened, T-Wrex would have won because it was the last bot to loose its movement. When the bout resumed, T-Wrex was not very responsive to the control and it looked like we may get counted out. However, the referees decided that since one half of the "Pack Raptor" was disabled, they would declare that bot disabled and declare T-Wrex the winner by knockout. The disability rules for multi-bots state that if "50% or more" of the bot "by weight" is disabled, the whole bot is declared disabled. Team Raptor appealed the decision on the basis that the bot that was disabled was lighter of the two bots. They took the bots to the official scale and had them weighed to prove their point. The judges refused to accept the weights because the bots were not impounded after the bout, so any weights taken later could not be guaranteed as reflecting the weights during the bout. There was also the issue that the two bots looked almost identical and so the judges were not even sure which bot was the one that was disabled. The compromise decision was that the knockout decision was set aside and the bout was sent to the judges as if it had run its full 2 minutes. Because of the solid hits T-Wrex scored on its opponents, T-Wrex was declared the winner by a comfortable margin. The hour it took to reach the final decision felt a lot longer than the time it took to decide the Florida election.

Because of the confusion and negative feelings between the teams, it was not possible for us to take pictures of the Pack Raptors. We may try and do that in the next day or two. We have agreed that if time and schedule allows, we will request a televised grudge match between the two bots. The organizers have so far downplayed the possibility of that happening, but we will keep you posted. Once again kudos to Alain for a great job driving and tossing around the opponents. [End of tournament note: The following day the hard feelings were set aside and the teams patched up their differences. In the mean time the Pack Raptors had been packed away so we were unable to get any pictures]

Our next task was to figure out what went wrong with T-Wrex. It turned out to be blown motor drivers. In trying to back out of being stuck under the spike strips, the motor drivers blew. This was the second instance of blown motors in the tournament (Omega-13 had motor failures yesterday). In this case, the events preceding the failure (trying to back out while stuck) and the failure mode (only the portion responsible for driving backwards had failed) were well known. The failure was also localized to only one chip per motor. Based on this new data, we were able to come up with a theory of how the high current in the bots was causing the controller in the motor driver to blow, when a higher current in the lab had not caused any problems - the extra resistance and inductance of the much longer cables and the connectors. Did I ever mention that both Brent and I HATE connectors. Fortunately we had brought enough tools and spare parts to diagnose the problem and fix the motors. The short-term fix is to cut down the peak current on both bots (only Omega-13 had been cut back up to this point). We believe it will not affect our performance in any meaningful way and should keep us safe from similar failures for the rest of the tournament.

With the technical and other problems of the day behind us, we called it a day. We will be back at 8:30 tomorrow morning to make sure that the bots are back together and we are ready to take on our next opponents in front of cameras and hopefully in front of a national audience.

Will send you an update on Saturday's events, which we hope will be just as full of success as this one and with fewer problems.