Robot Build and Battle at Marvell
Marvell hosted their annual HQ-wide Robot Build and Battle in Santa Clara CA to great success! 14 teams of 8 to 10 people each competed to build the Robot Battles 2 robot faster than each other. The winning team, Team RC – pictured here – posted the third fastest time all-time at 43:47! Congratulations to Team RC!
“Thank you so much for everything. The event was a huge success and we look forward to doing it again next year! Both the participants and spectators had fun and I imagine we will have more teams next year.”
Other team names included Brain Damage, The Darkside, Robotmen, Raccoon, Pineapple, Generic, HSC, D-Stream, and 5 other creative names I forgot over the last 24 hours. Team RC won both the build competition and the battle competition, winning four rounds of robot battle combat. D-Stream and Brain Damage originally tied for 2nd place, with Brain Damage subsequently winning a head-to-head battle to take sole possession of 2nd place in the end.
One of the significant reasons Team RC performed so well is that they had a professional robot driver on their team. David Liaw is the driver of Malice, from the famed Battle Bots TV show, and David also works at Marvell.
In 2020 Malice won almost 60% of their battles and KO’d the opponent almost 1/3 of the time at the highest levels of robot combat. Needless to say, David knows how to drive. He showed off his skill by winning the first three rounds of points based combat before I had to pry the remote from his hands.
David made one last appearance in the finals of the Last-Bot-Standing battle. He navigated his robot’s survival through all of the other robots, setting up a 1 on 1 battle for the final available championship belt. Somehow the other team spectacularly flipped David’s bot for a climactic finish to an amazing day of battles! The audience was stunned, and the winning robot driver forever enshrined in the annals of robot-battle-lore within the halls of Marvell!
A huge thank you to Marvell for hosting the third annual Robot Battles all company competition. It was great to see folks from all parts of the company competing to be the best team, with the best teamwork, and to win some of the robot battles!
