RoboGames, the huge cross-disciplinary international robotics competition, is running a kickstarter campaign to bring back the event in 2015, and they need your help to do it.
We love RoboGames. The range of competitions is so broad, there is opportunity for participation from roboticists of all backgrounds. We received a silver medal in the bartending division of the art robots category in 2011 with Drink Making Unit 2.0. In 2013, we helped Super Awesome Sylvia create the WaterColorBot, which won silver in the painting robots category. We helped to produce the medals for the winners in 2009 and 2013. But more important than our personal successes and participation, we have been privileged to see the excitement that comes from the entrants, whether they are competing in soccer, fire-fighting, sumo, or crowd-pleasing combat.
RoboGames is also planning production of a video series around the event, to bring it to those who can’t be there in person, and so that you can enjoy it whenever you need a good dose of robots.
I never got into Robogames. I think it was the lack of robots in the show. They were really just remote controlled cars with weapons. It would have been much better if the robots were required to seek out the enemy on their own…
There are a wide variety of autonomous events at RoboGames, but they’re often not as flashy as the heavy weight combat. Check out the list of competitions: http://robogames.net/events.php
Firefighting is one of my favorite of the autonomous events.
There are lots of neat events at robogames, but I have to agree with Trav, the real focus seems to be the killer death match. Even the kickstarter video really only talks about the 220s and mentions the others in passing. This is a shame, because the events like soccer and firefighting have the most potential in terms of research, not to mention actually helping train the next generation of engineers.
In fact there were two combat categories, 1lb autonomous and 3lb autonomous, where the robots were required to seek out their enemy and fight it on their own. I competed in them several times and greatly enjoyed it; the robots kept getting better. There were also non combat autonomous events such as line follower, table top and robomagellan as well as fire fighting. If the Games return I’ll be back with both autonomous and non autonomous combat machines.
Combat draws the big crowds because it is exciting. It also teaches you how to design very rugged machines which is important if you want a robot to work outside the lab and keep working.