Waymo Build Battle Robots
Employees from Waymo build and battle robots as part of a TeamWorx team building event in Downtown San Francisco. We always enjoy venturing deep into our city by the bay to deliver state-of-the-art robot team events. Impressing Waymo isn’t easy, but our event was up to the task. Based on the results, Waymo lived up to the reputation of folks bringing the future into reality, in the now!
Waymo is famous for making self-driving cars. What is the most important feature of self driving cars? …. Safety of course! So we were honored to have the safety team from Waymo take a chance on building and battling robots. Simply put, Waymo is “Making it safe and easy for people and things to get around — without the need for anyone in the driver’s seat.” It sounds great to me -especially in downtown San Francisco where not violating a traffic rule, or running into one of the myriad of moving mobile transport devices, or just getting lost, are all likely outcomes. Let the Waymo do the hard work!
As you would expect from a team with this much responsibility, they were great robot builders. The winning team “Firefly” – pictured here – finished in a truly remarkable time of 28:58 – placing them 24th all-time from thousands of participating teams over 10 years! All of the teams built quality robots which were showcased in 6 rounds of fierce points-based robot combat, and one exhilarating round of “last-bot-standing”!
The team names included Balloo-minator, Killer AI, Spare Parts (my favorite), Macallan, and JACK.
The battle rounds were fairly evenly distributed, with each team winning at least one round. The winning scores featured double digits that included 3 robot-flips in a round by multiple teams. The balloon carnage at the end of the battles spoke to how many points were scored popping balloons!
A huge thank you to Waymo for inviting us to their downtown office for a really fun robot build and battle team building event!
