[JakeD]

For the record I love the idea of Gundams fighting it out as an olympic event.

At its core this is really a debate on how do you define a sport. My personal feeling on the matter is that a sport is any competition used to quantitatively and/or qualitatively measure and rank human performance. This definition is quite broad but comes from my feeling that if Equestrian is allowed to be in the Olympics I don't understand why car racing isn't. But before I venture off too far from the original question, here is my vision on how robotics could be an Olympic event ignoring the ability to get the actual competition started...

The majority of the argument I would use to say robotics is a sport happens during build season so that essentially forces build to be part of the Olympics. In this regard I completely agree with EricH. Kickoff is the morning after opening ceremonies and teams retreat to their shops to start the game.

The shops are a pre defined area of covered space where teams are allowed to work(Their pit). Waiting for them in their pit is a kit, rule book, and electrical power and a pallet of stuff sent by the team. The pallet contains everything the team decided before competition they wanted to build the robot. And thats all you get. There's no machine shop, no internet connection allowed in the pits, and no help.

The Olympics in London this year are just over 2 weeks long. Assuming this stays relatively constant then thats the time frame the competition in its entirety has to fit into. So if "kickoff" is the morning after opening ceremonies then I would say pool play starts on the second friday. I'm using pool play because its the easiest way to give a large number of teams a fair chance to qualify, its common in many other olympic events, and you can run multiple fields at the same time. Pool play runs all friday and at the end of the day the top 2 or 4 teams (depending on the size of the tournament move on to the elimination tournament which is the following day. The elimination tournament runs all day long saturday with teams pitted against one another playing best 2 of 3.

The genius of my plan is in the team break down. Since robots working together and being designed to do so is such a large portion of robotics there should be more then 1 on 1 robots in matches. Thus each team builds 3 robots designed to play the game as a team. I think having to design the best combination of robots to deal with any situation on the field is what makes the game the most interesting.

Thats my dream for robotics in the olympics at least. Its a sport that tests the skill of multiple drivers, designers, and builders, by providing an extremely limited selection of materials. Plus by having one kit for multiple robots you have to decide which motors need to go to each robot as power is needed.

In the interest of full disclosure this was a thought based on talking to a friend from team 177 about how it was technically legal by first rules to bring in enough raw material and upgrade parts into your pit that if you shipped only your control system and some basic components you could keep your competition robot at your shop and assemble and build the entire robot in the pits on thursday.