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Re: Battlebots I.Q.- A serious threat to FIRST or a half thought up cheep copy?
To anyone who has not attended a battlebots competition but has expressed negative opinion of them: Please, do some more research and data gathering before forming an opinion.
I attended the BattleBotsIQ competition this past weekend along with Nathan Pell. While he got a good view of real match play, I stayed in the pits most of the day. Seeing what happens in those pits is truly amazing, watching teams of students come back to a heap of robot covered in battery base from a battery explosion, and work straight through for hours to get it back up and running. Last year, we recieved an award from RUSH, the "Never say Die" award. Our efforts last year when we won that award pale in comparison to what a standard battlebot team endures to make sure they can compete in the next match.
These students are not just motivated and and excited about engineering, but they truly learn it too. FIRST and BBIQ are not competition for each other, they're different elements. In FIRST, we all did the torque calculations and the force vectors for how high you can hold a tetra and how much power you need to get out of the kit motors. In BBIQ, you try and figure out how to maximize power and minimize damage. When was the last time a team did an elastic or inelastic collision calculation for transferring momenteum from one robot to another? In BBIQ, I started doing it in my head to figure out who would win each match and by what strategy. When was the last time a FIRST team did a real material analysis to determine if Chromoly steel or titanium was more effiecent for their purpose? In BBIQ, material selection is a huge problem and is a real world engineering problem that most teams in FIRST never deal with (how many robots are NOT an Alumnium frame in FIRST?).
Personally, I love them both.
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Curie Division 2005 Champions (175, 33, 108)
UCF 2005 Website Award
Midwest 2005 Delphi's Driving Tomorrow's Technology
2004 UCF QuarterFinalists (1065, 86, 108)
UCF 2003 Regional Champs/Entrepreneurship Award
Midwest Regional 2003 Leadership In Controls/Website award
Nationals 2003 Quarter Finalists
Robot Rodeo 2003 Champions (Alliance: 180 and 186)
AIM S/N: Specialagentjim
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