Two things about this awesome show on Discovery:
Gui Cavalcanti is an alumni of team 422, class of '02 I believe.
He’s posted up some really cool projects online, you should check them all out!
Where are the pictures posted?
I got confirmation from Amy, that it only the three of them out of the entire group of competitors. https://twitter.com/Amytheengineer/status/336912951338496000
Tonight’s (7:00 on Discovery; on their website the next day) episode might be of particular interest: we make a FIRST-like robot in 4 days. It must compete in 3 events: 100 m dash, javelin toss, long jump.
Also, there’s finally stuff that works!
Preview (and recap of previous episodes) here: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/the-big-brain-theory/videos/ep-3-recap-ep-4-sneak-peek.htm
For those who want more behind-the-scenes information, most of us contestants are putting our perspective somewhere on the internet. Mine, with links to most of the others is here: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ewhitman/TBBT/
So recently I turned on my TV…something I rarely do.
I watched this show new to the Discovery Channel known as “The Big Brain Theory” and lo and behold they were holding a “Robotics Challenge.” So I continued to watch and found out they had three challenges to make a robot to complete with 4 days to do it and a $10,000 budget.
All of the competitors looked to have degrees and had high “IQ’s” as shown on the screen.
Here’s the full episode…
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/the-big-brain-theory/videos/pure-genius-triathlabots.htm
Here were the three challenges…
Challenge 1: 100 Yard Dash
Challenge 2: Javelin Throw
Challenge 3: Standing Jump Distance
All I could think about watching the end was…Senior FIRST Robotics High School Students could do better. What are your thoughts?
You do know that 3 of the contestants have been part of FIRST, right? One of them has actually been active on Chief Delphi before.
But, we already have a thread about this: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=104045.
$10,000 to make it throw something, drive fast, and jump…You could probably pick any FRC team from the country with atleast 3 years of experience and they could do this. And I also love how they are calling it “a robot” and ye they can detach like 75% of it and launch another minibot; that’s a copout of the jump challenge.
So, Red’s 100 m beat Usain Bolt’s 100 m by about 2 seconds and Blue’s Javilin shot would have the second best world record & the standing long jump beats the current world record (though it’s not an olympic event anymore) by 4 feet!
I agree with the decision to eliminate Dan, he seems detrimental to all of the teams he has been on. The comment Mark Fuller made about Dan being the first captain to not throw someone else under the bus, though, is wrong. Joe, in the very first episode, accepted that he was the one responsible for his team’s failure.
I tuned in for this one. Typical TV though. Focus on the “human” drama and less about design decisions and their components. That is, they summarize the result of the teams’ decisions, and bypass the give/take at the outset. The jumper was a surprise for me that it was so well balanced and so on. We nerds would have appreciated at least an outline of the static and dynamic calculations that got that little buggy so hopped up, so to speak.
Ghaaa! Only an engineer would find that entertaining.
(I know I would) 
In 4 days with 5 people? I am skeptical.
1-2 build engineers and 3-4 4th year build students? I could see it being done pretty easily.
The one thing that I have guessed about the show is that all parts were located nearby. It didn’t seem like they could get stuff from online.
Actually…
*Ewhitman, mentor of Girls of Steel (FRC Team 3504), is a contestant on the show.
Gotta love McMaster-Carr’s next-day-delivery.
And that’'s why I guessed.
I don’t know, I know that if my team tried to do so with the numbers you suggested and the time they are given, we would still have a lot of trouble with it.
While we could get parts from anywhere, lead time was always a problem. This particular build started on a Friday and lasted 4 days. That meant the final day of our build was exactly 1 business day after the first day, severely limiting what components were available to us. Specifically, we had a ton of trouble getting motor controllers in time. I was close to begging local teams for Victors, but we were (before end-of-business on Friday, the first day) able to “next day” ship SyRens to arrive on Monday, the final day of the build.
It was not made clear on the show, but the goal of the javelin toss was not to throw it as far as possible. The producers knew we were capable of throwing it onto the street past the field. Instead, we were to aim for as close as possible to the human world record of 90.5 m. Our second and 3rd shot were 7 m short and 4 m long respectively.
As to whether a typical FIRST team could do it:
I would say we had about the same complexity as a FIRST robot, with 9 actuated degrees of freedom.
A FIRST build lasts 51 days, though the better teams can easily do it in less. We had 4, though they were 12-hour days.
FIRST teams use the same components from year to year, often iterating on previous designs, especially in the drivechain/chassis and electronics subsystems. We didn’t even know we were building a robot ahead of time and were unable to source the components that we were familiar with in time. To use the same example as above, the SyRen motor controllers, which nobody on our team had ever used before, arrived Monday morning, about 10 hours before we had to finish.
The rest was probably no harder (or easier) than it looked. You can draw your own conclusions.
For more information and behind-the-scenes notes, go here:
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ewhitman/TBBT/ep4.html
I, and many of the other contestants, write up notes each week. They’re mostly all linked here:
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ewhitman/TBBT/