Facebook Team Building Menlo Park Robot Wars
Facebook Team Building Menlo Park was dominated by team “Winning as a Service” – who were clearly inspired robot builders and battlers.
The robot team building event featured some unique features including the introduction of the Flipper and the Slayer prototype models. The Flipper was definitely effective when paired with a teammate bot with other strengths, as it relied on a head-on confrontation to flip the other bot. Under these conditions it was highly effective, however getting other bots to engage in this manner after they learn the strengths and weaknesses of the Flipper bot was difficult. When paired with a teammate that could aggressively attack the balloons and force bots to rotate in defense, the Flipper had opportunities to enage in the effective trajectory range more often.
The favorite in terms of prototypes was indeed the Slasher. It allowed for immediate access and success without help or modification, and at times appeared to be more effective than the standard model. Especially early on before other drivers learned it’s behavior patterns, the Slasher was taking out 2 balloons at a time with a high rate of success.
Team Winning as a Service (pictured above) posted a winning time of 45:30 (forty five minutes and thirty seconds) – just 10 seconds difference from the winning group from Intel this very same morning. This truly is another piece of data to confirm that teams of 4-5 people make it very challenging to compete for the world record against teams of 6-7 people, however, they can successfully complete the robot in 45 minutes to 55 minutes consistently.
Winning as a Service beat out Research and Destroy and Roptomize by a hair with all three of these teams finishing under 47 minutes. We finished with a 7 bot all-bot melee including the two prototypes and played until the robots were compromised beyond immediate repair capabilities. You can see from the picture above they were one of the few groups to implement a successful “tournament style” team-versus-team format – a huge accomplishment in itself!
A huge thank you to this team from Facebook for having us out. We had a great time and truly appreciate it!
Robot Team Building
