[santosh]

BEST stands for Boosting Engineering Science and Technology. I heard it was a spin-off of FIRST or something like that. Not sure. But it is a robotics competition with a very large amount of restrictions. The robots are only 2 ft cube and weigh 24 pounds maximum. They give you a tub full of parts and tell you to build a robot to complete the task. The catch is that you can only use what is given to you in the tube. In th tub is a lot of wood, some PVC pipe, bicycle tubing, screws and just small items like that. You get 4 motors and i think 3 servos and you control the robot using a Futaba radio controller. You are only allowed to use 4 channels on your robot. This year you ha to build a stationary robot that scooped up McDonalds play balls and place them in a tub along with some other oner tasks.

I beleive there are like 10 regionals for this competition. Most of the teams come from Texas. There is something like the chairmans award there also and there is championships held in Auburn Alabama very year.

Usually there is no building help from companies and there arent any sponsors usually for this competition because it is fre to participate in.