So as it was mentioned in Bill’s Blog, here is the link to see Dean Kamen and three robotics teams from New Hampshire (1058, 501, and 40) in a commercial on Discovery Channel. It happens around 25 seconds.
It’s only a second or two, but it still is there.
To further that. It looks like 2008 “OverDrive”
(The loops on the left robot.)
Yes it is 1058’s 2008 robot. They kinda consider that to be there best robot in their history. I agree. And the producers said it looked better than their 2009 robot. That’s what I was told by one of the students.
Does 1058 still have their robot from 2004? One of my favorite strategies, from one of my favorite games. 
(Background: For those of you who don’t know their were 18 13" playground balls suspended over the drivers stations at either end of the field. The objective was to pick them up and return them to the human player who could them shoot them into the goal, as robot scoring of the playground balls was not allowed. When you knocked a ball of a stand at midfield, or 45 seconds into the game, the balls came down. Most teams built collectors to suck them up off the floor, but some teams built these huge unfolding net contraptions, betting they could get under the balls before the drop, and scoop them up in one go. 1058 build a huge unfolding PVC and netting contraption to catch the falling balls. It wasn’t the most effective mechanism, but it looked sweet.)
Also, at this time, their official team name was the Dragoons. Did they build with PVC in 2003 as well, or was 2004 the first year of PVC?
Yeah I just saw this commercial on Discovery and was going to post it, or look to see if others have already posted it. Well I was beat.
It is funny how the MC coined their team name that year.:]
Yes, they did use PVC in their first year. They had wings to stack and push the rubbermaid bins around the field and the only thing that wasn’t PVC was their frame. But I do not know if it is still operational.
Unfortunately we don’t have any robots before 2007 still. We’ve taken parts off of past ones to build our new ones.
But I’m pretty sure we’ve incorporated PVC in some way every year since the first year, even though it wasn’t intentional at first. haha. and last year was PVC overkill! well, we all learn from our mistakes…
I’m in the commercial, the girl in the pink on the left side! The perks of working at FIRST =]
i love that song
i’m in the commercial!!! me (Brendan McLeod), along with Stacey Champagne (both of team 1058) are “working” on our robot on the left. The robot is our Overdrive robot!
It was so much fun to film this with Dean!!! If you cant tell by his tone, he wasn’t to happy about the singing part!
He didn’t sound thrilled…
and now I have the song stuck in my head. Thanks.
Maybe Dean Kamen can’t sing??? He can’t do everything.
93 notably did the same thing, and was extremely competitive I hear (they also had an intake roller for any they missed).
Loved the advert. I guess the Discovery Channel was at the IRI Talent Show, huh.
I saw this (via twitter) on Saturday, this song is VERY catchy and i find myself humming it everywhere i go. But the song is true to it’s word, The world is just awesome
That was the plan Chris, that was the plan (I can’t say anything about the scores though!).
Saw it twice while watching Mythbusters tonight. Definitely short; had to come here to see who the third team was (40’s shirts and 501’s number gave them away).
Side note: The sailor a few clips in was the first person under the age of 18 to circumnavigate the world solo. If you have a lot of free time, try reading the blog/comments in the link.
I wished they had used the take where it was myself, Dean, and the actor (yes, let it be known that the kid in the red was not on our team, he was paid to be there) were all around our robot and singing…because our 1058 was right there in the front view. And for some reason, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us to go grab our bumpers from our other robot that was there and put them on overdrive because that would have had the number right on the side of it in view. Oh well.
OH! That’s who that was. I thought it was the kid from Twilight (i’ve never seen it, hopefully never will), but that is who it reminded me of.:rolleyes: An actor? WOW that is a new one.
On a related note, I highly suggest Lionheart by Jesse Martin, who completed his solo circumnavigation at a 18 years and 1.5 months. Fascinating stuff…
I’ve heard about that one. If you have time, read the blog of the guy I linked to–especially the comments. There are a bunch of similar tales out there. You really want to have a LOT of free time when you do, though. (Also note: three guys were going around the world solo and met up at some point. One is the oldest. The other two were racing for youngest. All have blogs.)
The robots in the pictures are 1058’s 2008 robot:
Team 501’s 2009 robot:
and Team 40’s 2009 robot:
