Bay Area Robot Battles – Scorching Build Time Earns Best All Time @ Facebook
Bay Area Robot Battles event yielded the BEST build time in a Facebook history at 27:29 (twenty seven minutes and twenty nine seconds) from team Hazard Pointers. They beat the previous best time of 28:30 (twenty eight minutes and thirty seconds) set on July 12, 2018 by just over 1 minute! Considering the number of teams that have competed from Facebook, this is a truly remarkable achievement; especially considering it was a team of only 4 people. The all-time World Record for the robot building event is 22:35.
This event brought a group of engineers from both California and Seattle together to participate in the robot build and battle. We set up 4 teams in a large room at the Redwood Community Center. It was a beautiful day, and the floor to ceiling windows gave a great view of the park in front of us. The group immediately started off the fun with some crazy team names including: Ballbusterz, The Dues, Robosmashers and our current Facebook build champion, Hazard Pointers.
Naturally, the engineers were excited to battle, and many great team versus team battles quickly turned into one large melee. After everyone had battled several times they began to modify the robots. We thought we had seen everything after running hundreds of robot events (many with engineers), and yet we did see some novel and fruitful modifications that impressed us.
The goal of course was to make more effective smashing/balloon popping machines. Leonidas, our host from Facebook, took the initiative to move his motors to the front of his build to create a front wheel drive battlebot. In theory, it was less likely to flip over. In practice we noticed that keeping the attack arm down in front of the robot, coupled with front wheel drive, offered a more effective balloon popping scenario.
Congratulations to a remarkable team from Facebook: to set the Facebook build record and create a useful modification in just one session is truly robot amazing!
Robot Team Building
