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FIRST is by far a better competition than battle bots, we can all see that. FIRST not only lets you build a robot, but you can also make animations, have sprit teams, design graphics....
At battlebots IQ you see none of these things, and in fact thier robots arent very technical. In the finals there were 2 wedges squaring off. I highly doubt that in a first robot all you will see is a drive train. You wont see technologically advaced machines like thw wildstang robot out there. Infact i doubt that most of the robots were even programmed past the default program. There werent any interesting control systems. And after walking around in the pits i could say that there are basically no sensors on any of the robots. So one could say they are just R/C Vehicles on steriods.
In the article it talks about the first team who competed in BBIQ and how after being pulverized it was KOed. What they dont talk about is that they had come back from being basically pulverized into a big piece of bent alumninum 2 times and came back. If you looked at thier robot it was basically a FIRST robot with armour. It was made from T slot extrusions and Wheelchair wheels. Of all of the robots they took the biggest beating. Now why did i tell you all of this? Because they used what they learned in FIRST made the mos basic first robot and they did amazinly well. So our robots are tough and complex at the same time.
I went to battlebots IQ in orlando and the atmosphere is almost an inverse of waht it is like at our competition. The crowd just sits there and watches. There were a few kids from Combbat there and anyone that has seen them at a compettion knows they have some of the best spirit. I dont think they had a team there, but when YMCA came on they all got up and did one of thier coordinated dances. And the crowd was stuned they all sat there as they danced and took pictures like it was a show. Now for us at a FIRST competiton we see crazy things like that all day long.
I think that BBIQ is good because it educates people on building basic robots and inspires some kids to go into engineering. But FIRST is by far the superior competiton, and even if battle bots has more appeal to the average joe. but FIRST competitors are FAR from the average, we learn so much from this competition and we have so much fun that any educator can see that FIRST is better. Most of the BBIQ robots dont have the quality of sponsors liek we have, so the corperations that are out there see that FIRST is better too. And i dont care if i dont go on TV cause i will build a robot anyway.
Andrew
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