|
We went to the Robolympics on Sunday, 21 March 2004 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California, USA.
Fort Mason Center is a complex of warehouse buildings on piers by the bay in San Francisco. (Upper Fort Mason is a now a Park & Residential area.) Inside the middle warehouse building, was the Herbst Pavilion - site of the Robolympics 2004. It was a sunny day, but the "natural air conditioner" of San Francisco was running: a cold breeze blew in from the Bay, making it a little chilly outside.
|
|
The production quality of the ROBOlympics was less than perfect. My wife told me she was a little disappointed with it shortly after we got there. But this is an engineers / geek event...the most important focus is Robots, not event design. Near the entrance, there were folding tables set out with various types of robots on display, including products for sale by the "Robot Store" and other vendors.
Just beyond that were the locations for the smaller scale robotic events. You may not know that there are many different fields of robot competition, and many different robot designs for each of them. There were very simple BEAM type robots (for example: "Photovores" that compete to move to a location on a table with the most light.) Lego Robots (mostly line following robots, which use a sensor to follow a line - fastest time wins the event), Sumo robots - which struggle to push one another out of circlular table top arena, Soccer playing robots - teams of robots controlled by computers that monitor the action by video camera from above, fire fighting robots - which navigate a maze and find where a fire is, and the most traditionally humanoid robot like: boxing & wrestling robots (primarily from Japanese participants.)
In the center of the building, was the main attraction - which took the most space and made the most noise : the Robot Combat event (as seen on TV in the form of Robot Wars / Battle Bots / Robotica, etc.) This consists of remotely controlled fighting robots - some heavily armored and equipped with mechanical weapons like saw blades, hammers, lifting arms, or spinning bodies. These combat robots bash against each other, competing to knock their opponent out of commission, or at least to win by demonstrating superior aggression. The robots battle it out inside a large square arena, fenced in by a steel framed wall with Lexan plastic windows (which are very scratched and scuffed, making it difficult to take pictures of the battle.)
Like most sporting events, it is more impressive and exciting to see robot combat in person. Even my wife began to show interest after a few noisy & violent robot battles. She began to make bets with my daughter on which robot would win. It's scary when a heavyweight robot gets flung up against the Lexan windows of the arena only 2 meters away from where you are sitting. There were loud crashes, and flashes of sparks. After some battles, one of the staff threw a piece of broken metal to the crowd. The combat event was narrated by a wrestling announcer style guy wearing a tuxedo. It's too bad that this is the style of presentation that has become popularized in the U.S. I prefer the U.K. style of emphasizing more of the engineering prowess of the participants, rather than the U.S. style of appeal to the lowest common denominator.
|
|
In the back of the building were the "Pits" where teams participating in the combat events were working on their combat machines.
My two daughters showed a lot of interest in all the robots. They wanted to look at more robot pictures on the internet after we went home. My older daughter suggested we should build one. That's just the kind of thing a dad wants to hear!
I took more photos and video, but Boing Boing has logged many links to other sites photo galleries of the event, with more and better pictures than the ones I took. Here are a few links:
|
