Walnut Creek Team Building 24 Teams Battle Robots
A Walnut Creek Team Building event with Underground Construction yielded a lightning fast robot build time of 31:48 (thirty one minutes and forty eight seconds) placing them in the top 10% of teams all-time. Team “Well Above Average” beat out 23 other highly competitive teams in a gigantic robot build and battle competition. The team was made up of an interesting mix of construction folks including an Asphalt-Concrete Restoration Superintendent, a Safety Manager, 2 Project Managers, the Director of Fleet, and an Electrical Safety Manager.
Spending time with Underground Construction was eye opening for sure. My first image of an underground construction project was a 60’s style bomb shelter, however what it often means is running pipes. From the presentations we saw, and the people we talked with, it is obvious that this is almost never a straight forward or an easy process.
The complexities of digging underground alone bring up hazards, permitting, and environmental issues. Add to that the pure engineering challenges of making pipes fit in the given space while maintaining proper flow, the challenges of access just to get equipment into place, and the unpredictable nature of things in the physical world, especially when it comes to fluids, and you can see this is a very specialized industry with “get it done” professionals at the top of their game.
Sure enough the battles reflected all of this energy and expertise. The robots were built exceptionally well across the board, with the exception of two robots (“crazy horse” and “three wheels”). The advantage of well built bots are multiple rounds of uninterrupted robot combat. For the most part, we had over 20 bots in each melee round, maxing out at the full 24 bots for three of the rounds! This allowed us to do seven melee rounds of battle, so everyone battled at least once and some people twice, and then five more additional rounds of the Last Bot Standing format.
A huge thank you to a truly impressive group of problem solvers, project completers, and highly trained engineers!
Robot Team Building
