Hyper Robotics among leaders after first day of competition

Team Hyper 69 has seen its share of success in competition, and so far it seems 2009 is no different.

After one full day of competition Hyper has five wins in seven competitions, which is good enough to place them in the top 10 out of 53 teams going into the final day of the Boston Regional.

This year’s game is Lunacy, which Boston First describes as a competition between two three-team alliances being played on a 54×27-inch, low-friction field. The teams’ robots have slippery wheels and payload trailers used to collect "orbit balls" and have to score them in the trailers of the opposition with the help of human players positioned along the outside of the arena.

The orbit balls are divided into moon rocks, empty cells, and super cells. Moon rocks and empty cells scored in the other team’s trailer are worth two points each and super cells are worth 15 points. Super cells, however, must be activated when robots deliever empty cells from their outpost to their fueling station and can only be played in the final 20 seconds of the match.

The human players start with 20 moon rocks and can put as many as seven of those in the robots, but the trailers begin empty. Human players also start with a certain number of super and empty cells determined by the result of their previous match, or two and four cells respectively if it’s their first match.

Match results and videos are posted online. Click here to view the video of Team Hyper’s first qualifiying match.

Check back later for Saturday’s final results and award presentations, or follow the competition live today on Twitter.