Abbott San Francisco Robot Battles
San Francisco Robot Battles can take place at many excellent venues throughout the city. One of my personal favorites is the Hotel Zephyr game room located on Beach St near Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf. It provides room for up to 5 teams and beautiful concrete floors that are ideal for robot battles. A research team from Abbott Laboratories came from different parts of the country to discuss things much more important than robot building, however probably not as fun.
In general the audience invented new materials to solve problems with the heart and improve health, They know anatomy and materials. The robot build times reflected this material expertise with two teams below the 30 minute mark at 25:52 and 28:29 (team Quatro). Team Bot Bruisers posted the fifth fastest all-time robot build time at 25:52! The craftspersonship of all teams was impressive so it was equally impressive I was able to predict the winner just minutes into the event.
Although every team was excellent, Bot Bruisers did all of the small details that lead to great build times including setting up their entire electronics in advance, building the frame accurately and fast, preparing every step of every component including how the bolts would be mounted and tightened in advance, great leadership that observed and drew knowledge from multiple sources, being hyper proactive, “all hands all the time” mentality, and a calm “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” tempo.
The battles gradually increased in ferocity as the drivers became more comfortable with the controls and the nuances of battle smashing. Everyone – including an unnamed person starting with “T” – took their turns battling in the melee arena. Team Bot Bruisers bruised their way to an early lead with two melee victories in a row. The momentum turned when innovation took to the floor with team Johnny 5 War Machine modifying their attack arm to resemble an upper cut punch.
Early aspirations were for this design to aid in flipping the robots. Although visually and intuitively likely, the horsepower in the “quick twitch” top servo was lacking to push metal. However, an unintended advantage came to light as their balloon popping frequency significantly increased leading to three straight victories and the overall battle championship!
A huge thank you to Abbott for inviting us to join their team of talented engineers! We hope to see more teams from Abbott challenge themselves and the World Record!
Robot Team Building
