Every year around March, our team has the soon to be graduating senior class name the robot and my question to you is, how does your team name the robot? Do you have standard naming conventions? Is it a whole team affair? How did you determine the “best” name for your robot? Did you name your robot off of specific mechanisms/ capabilities, etc?
Yesterday, our senior class had a 2 hour long conversation talking about names and we’ve only narrowed it down to 3 (but that may increase)! I’d also love to hear your stories about how your robot’s name came about!
Naming the robot is often one of the most contentious decisions of our build season. We usually have a whole team submit names, and then we vote it down to finalists, and from there we do another vote for the name. I wouldn’t say our process is ideal.
Our team (461) names the robot Rowdy (insert year of team existence here). As we didn’t build a new robot for the 2021 season, it’ll be interesting what the new robot gets named.
We don’t have any specific naming conventions, though the name is usually something to do with the season’s theme and the character of the robot. The process is pretty simple: at some point late in the build season (after the character of the robot has been established), the whole team proposes names and votes on them, with the winner being the one used. Usually it works out well. For instance, our Power-up robot was named Eugene Crabbes because it had a claw-like grabber for handling power cubes (i.e., it was a grasping crab just like its namesake) and was cartoonish in keeping with the 8-bit theme of the season. Our current robot is Darth Roomba, because it’s all black and vacuums up power cells like it’s using the force. It’s a fairly haphazard way to name the robot, unlike the unified thematic team names that some teams use, but it works for us.
Generally one student comes up with a name and it just sticks tbh. Our 2020 bot was named “Isopod”, since our practice bot was named “sea urchin” (due to the number of zip ties that we had put on one roller temporarily to maintain ball contact) and so we wanted to keep the ocean theme, and our electrical lead came up with the name “Isopod” because “Isopods can move, and so can this robot!” (We didn’t move for a bunch of matches during our 2019 season).
This is a difficult thing to do, I think, for any team. We usually send a google form for team members to submit names. Then some of the leadership screens theses names and removes inappropriate suggestions, memes, or other similar issues. After that we create a DemoChoice Poll with the remaining names to figure out which one wins.
We use DemoChoice Poll because it has instant runoff voting, so students can vote for their second, third, fourth, etc. favorite name. This has resulted in the least amount of contention for us.
This is the one aspect of our team that is not democratic. Our tradition is build lead gets to name the robot. However it is important for the lead to pick something that the team actually likes or it won’t stick.
There was a period of 3 or so years that the team used steel puns: Shaquille o Steel (tall elevator bot), Steel arm strong (big arms and deep space theme), Steel Patrick Harris (IDK why).
Team vote. I go around asking the team to come up with a robot name. It has to be either cat based. Tied into the theme of this year’s game or with an X in it. At the end of the meeting the answers are put on a board and the team votes on which name they want. It cannot be anything obscene or offensive.
In most years something notable happens and the robot name just becomes accepted through team consensus. There’s a voting process, but generally there’s an overwhelming favorite.
On our first season we had an hours long meeting, in the middle of that as we couldn’t agree on a name we decided to have an alphanumeric code for the bot which was the team’s name initials, and the order of the boton the line up so thefirst was called BS-01 “atom” the atom nickname didn’t stick for long but we follow the BS-0x to this day so this year’s is called BS-05
We also take nominations and hold a vote. Top vote getter is competition bot, runner up is practice bot. NASA rover names are often popular. This year we ended up with Endeavor(practice) but for reasons unknown to me Felix is the “competition” bot (it never competed since it wasn’t done for week one, we took Endeavor to Greater KC in 2020).
Then of course, there are the battery names. Every year they vote on a theme (Pokemon, Planets, Cheeses, etc) and the names come from there.
For us, we usually write down all the names on the board, then take a vote for which one is best. Last year, it ranged from Thanos to Tweakimus Prime to R.O.B.
We were more serious in our early days using our nickname Skip 5: Skip 5 (2011), Skip 5.3 (2013), and Skip 5.5 (2015). Legacy, but boring.
Best name was 1058’s 2016 robot Low Expectations because it fit under the low bar and was low goal focused. Ironic because we won three districts with it so the meme really grew here.
