EngiNeerds

HOMETOWN: Slatina, OT, Romania

WEBSITE: https://engineerds.cnrg.ro/

DISTANCE: 5,104 miles (8,214.07 km)

SOCIALS:

REGION: RO

YEAR FOUNDED: 2023

QUALIFICATIONS

• One of our greatest accomplishments this season is ranking among the top-performing teams worldwide. With a npOPR (no-penalty offensive power rating) score that places us in the Top 50 out of over 7,700 teams globally, we have consistently shown our robot’s effectiveness during competition. This, we believe, highlights the effort we put into refining our technical skills, in both hardware and software development.
• Additionally, our performance in Romania's West League Tournament represents a significant milestone in our team's history, as this is the first competition in which we believe our robot truly showed it's full potential. We finished as part of one of the top three alliances in the league, thus showcasing our ability to progress and learn throughout the season. Through these match results, our team also secured 1st place in the Control Award category, with this being the first official FIRST award in our team's 2-and-a-half season history (for context, our team participated in the regional phase of the SKYSTONE season, then going on a 4-year-long hiatus before participating once again in the CENTERSTAGE season)
• One of the most incredible moments for our team this season was achieving a solo match score of 301 points, which ranks among the top 8 highest solo match scores in the world. Furthermore, our AUTO program, which successfully scores six SPECIMENs and one SAMPLE, has only been accomplished by three other teams globally. To successfully perform such an AUTO, we make use of the artificial intelligence feature of our Limelight 3A camera. A neural network is used for object detection, our model being trained on over 3500+ SAMPLE images. The data is then sent over to our movement follower, which, in turn, allows for positional correction during AUTO. Videos to both the individual AUTO period & the full 301 point game are linked below:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoAQ3fOHY1o
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhcwD7ehDOw
• From a competitive standpoint, achieving success is clearly our team’s primary goal, but it's not the only type of success we wish to achieve. Our season has been defined by constant learning from previous iterations and rigorous testing. We take great pride in our ability to grow with each roadblock we encounter while developing a culture of collaboration inside all of our departments. Meetings are held each week to ensure teammate satisfaction, and, as everybody's opinion is taken into consideration, this ensures that nobody is being treated unequally.
• This sums up the team's successes during the ITD season. Altogether, these achievements highlight just exactly how far we've come as a team throughout this season.

FUN FACTS:

• The original name of our team was actually "EngiNerds", but due to a typing error when registering on the Romanian FTC organizer's website, we were left with the name "EngiNeerds". This error could've been remediated, but the original team decided it actually sounded better, so it stuck around!
• The team's mascots, two ducks called "Gogu" and "Gigel", came up by total accident after a team member sent the wrong STL file to our 3D Printing service provider. At that point in time, we didn't have our own 3D Printer, so we had to get them from "Delta Aluminium", one of our team's primary sponsors.
• Our team's TikTok account has one of the largest followings in Romanian FTC. This is primarily due to our unique way of promoting FTC towards newcomers (that is, we post totally brain-rotted stuff).
• During this season's Romanian National Championship, we rebuilt our regional championship robot in one night, after running into time constraint issues. This robot was used in our last qualifying match, on the 3rd day of the championship, and the difference between the second day & third day's robots can be seen in the VOD.