Side events for post season competitions
 

Hi all. Just about to start planning for California Robot Games for this year, and was wondering if people have any ideas for side competitions for these sort of off season competition.

So far I have these few ideas:

Obstacle course

King of the hill - two robot start at the bottom of a ramp section and see who get pushed off the ramp first.

Speed test - See which robot can make it from one side of the field and back the fastest

Autonomous mode competition - 15 seconds of autonomous mode trying to take down the most stacks of bins and/or getting the closest to the top of the ramp

Human player game with human players trying to stack the highest stack, or place the most numbers of bins in the shortest time.

If you have any good suggestions, please feel free to post them in here! Hopefully some of the other events will make use of some of these ideas.

How about a competition with stackers, controlled conditions, where the stackers are trying to make the highest stack in the shortest amount of time?

I've suggested this to many people, but I'll say it again: have a few matches where the engineers drive the robot! We did that at the West Michigan Invitational in 1997 (before it was a regional) and it was a blast! Who wouldn't want to see Raul, Andy Baker, and the Beattys play a match?

Lol that would be great. Mr Noble and Bill driving!! Andy driving would be priceless!!!
Shannon Schnepp and Chris Noble!!!
Bob Evoy driving:)

Libby Ritchie was talking about having a robot dance contest at IRI!!! sounds like fun to me...

What about like a tug of war.

Or a tractor pull style event.

Or a blind folded driver contest where the drivers have to drive up the ramp blindfolded (we are working on practicing this.)

umm i'll think of more later.

We also discussed seeing if we could get a match were our advisor who was our driver last year could drive atleast once with me this year cuz i miss driving with him like last year:)

At the SCRRF Summer Classic last year there was a 3 vs 3 tug of war, a truck pull, and an obstacle course. The truck pull was extremely unfair as the person sitting in the truck could not control the steering wheel or brakes correctly (our robot almost got run over). The tugg of war was good but was hard on robots and there was very little rope or string available to hook up with. The obstacle course was composed of sprategically placed sticks and cereal boxes all held together with duct tape. The course had sections with only fractions of an inch clearance and the course got destroyed.

The really interesting thing was that the engineers got a feel for just how difficult it is to drive a robot in a match. I think many of them who participated had newfound respect for their drive team :cool: