Chowbotics Sets Battle Robot World Record at Corporate Team Building Robot Event!

Chowbotics Sets Battle Robot World Record at Corporate Team Building Robot Event!

Chowbotics hosted a corporate team building robot event at their worldwide headquarters in Redwood City CA. “Chowminators” (pictured above) set the new World Record build time of 25:57 for the Battle Robots, beating the previous record set by LinkedIn of 26:19! We were literally counting down the seconds as they completed the last steps and finished the robot 22 seconds before the previous record time. This feat is especially significant because in all other cases when the World Record was broken it involved 20 or more teams and 100 to 300 people. The team sizes were also generally 8-10 people per team.

Consider this month alone we had groups from Facebook, Apple, EA, Amazon, Intuitive Surgical  (robotics maker), LinkedIn, Bosch, and Red Hat – so the competition is first class.

This team from Chowbotics was only 5 people and the group had only 3 teams. I think building the world’s only robotic salad dispensing machine pays off in terms of building robots for fun! The overlap of skill sets was noticeable to me. One of the spectacular parts of robot building is that if one part of the robot does not work the whole robot doesn’t work. The team is only as good as it’s weakest link from a quality perspective. Chowbotics understood this and worked to both support and move forward at lightning speed. As they put it:

“Thanks to how we embrace the startup life, Chowbotics is used to getting twice as much done in half the time.”

The intense attention to detail and familiarity with how overall robotics work were both huge assets for this team. Although the specific components we use are different and they had to learn like everyone else how to use them, how they go together, and which tool to use, you could tell their overall understanding of torque, gears, motors, and craftsmanship played to their favor.

From a speed perspective it is the sum total of all the parts, and the transition time between components and putting it all together. All parts of the team have to perform well to break a record. In this case they had both great attention to detail throughout, assigned additional resources to the frame component early, and were proactive in diagnosing what was going to happen; not just reacting as things became available. This combination along with talent was a perfect recipe for breaking the record!

A huge thank you to Chowbotics and a giant congratulations on breaking the record!