Robots in hometown parades

[rachelholladay]

This year we took our old (and partly torn apart for parts) 2009 robot to one of our towns Mardi Gras parades. We are from Louisiana, there are several parades a week in February and March, not even getting into the New Orleans ones. Since it was on short notice and during one of the last weeks of build season, we just put the robot in the back of my-car-turned-ghetto-Mardi-Gras-float. Although he didn't run, people still liked seeing a robot covered in beads. We think we are going to do it next year (with way more beads because people are crazy about it) but I am a little worried about driving a robot down a 5 mile Mardi Gras parade route.

Each year team 256 parades one or two of its robots in the Homecoming Parade throughout downtown Willow Glen. A ton of people love it, and we end up getting a lot of people interested in robotics. After the parade we go down Lincoln Avenue (downtown) and let interested people try out the robots. We usually have 2 robots out there, our t-shirt robot where we fire t-shirts to people, and our competition robot for that year, unless there's not much to show off, like previously mentioned.