How old is your oldest robot

We don’t keep most of our robots. Most of the parts are recycled for the next year…

But one of the few ones that have stayed ever since was our very first robot, Bob. He’s in our Awards Room, so we haven’t operated the robot in YEARS. I’m sure it’s still working though, underneath all the collected dust.

If you don’t know of the story, the Fembots built Bob at Silicon Valley Regional back in 2001. The Fembots arrived with materials and the Kit of Parts and were able to build the robot with the help of several other teams – and they built it in 6 hours!

41 still has our 2008 robot working and nearly fully functional. I believe the IR board needs to be reflashed (have the dump somewhere), and one of the fisher price gearboxes needs to be replaced. We used it last year in a demo.

Here is a look at the control system mentioned earlier in this thread…
That little gold box in the second picture is the Tekin speed controllers we had to use before IFI came along with the 883. It is about 1 x 2" and would smoke at about 20 amps.
We used drill batteries to power the drive system in those robots because we used actual drills to drive the wheels as you can see in picture 3. Oh, and we didn’t have any way to distribute power, no PDP, no breaker panel.
These pictures were taken during LRI training this year.









Yeah. It looks like this these days. A few days of serious work and it can be operational again. We would need to find a couple of screamers…







135 has every robot since 1998. Most still have all of the parts on them but 2015 is the only one that we still use (due to the control systems on older robots and the fact that some of them are broken from being used at competition). Our coach that started the team does not like to take apart the robots so we try not to remove anything from them. It’s very interesting to look at a wooden robot that’s almost 20 years old.

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Our 2014 robot, Odin, is together enough to drive and do demonstrations.

We just took apart our 2014 robot as well as our 2015 MAR winning robot to make space.