Google Onsite Team Building Mountain View
For an onsite team building Mountain View event, this Google venue was spectacular setting for Robot Battles team building. Normally a swank coffee shop in the sky with a lounge deck and view West across the bay, today it was transformed into a robot battle field for about 40 people. Luckily all of our instructions are laminated, and the robot parts are aircraft grade aluminium, because the winds were formidable and dangerous for paper products and lighter matter.
Five teams set out to build the robot faster than each other, and in the end, only one prevailed – at everything. Teams Robot Wars, ExtremeMurderBot3000.5, Robomonster, Foodies, and Chia Pudding Tigers, all built successful robots that were able to compete in multiple battles. Team ExtremeMurderBot3000.5 won the build competition in a close contest with an impressive build time of thirty four minutes and forty five seconds (34:45)! Under 35 minutes is generally considered a top 10% all time build time from thousands of teams – nice job!
The battles were super exciting with numerous balloon pops and robot flips – in fact three teams ran out of balloons which rarely (if ever) happens – that is a lot of popping! Team ExtremeMurderBot3000.5 was the clear overall winner by winning every melee session. Other teams had impressive flips and many popped balloons, but ExtremeMurderBot3000.5 was just a little better each time.
This battle showcased some great driving including many of the techniques we like to see in action for flipping the robots including a textbook example of the “bump and smash” = a technique where the aggressor robot bumps the opposing robot up, goes back quickly, and then smashes back into the opposing robot to create a dramatic and decisive flip. These maneuvers make my day!
A huge thank you to Google for inviting us onsite for a spectacular robot team event!
Robot Team Building
