What is Your Favorite Robot?
As the 2025 season begins, it would be awesome to hear what your favorite robot are from any year! We had a blast interviewing students at the 2024 Beach Blitz Offseason Competition asking them exactly this!
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Tumbleweed by 148. Played Overdrive in 2008. Nine sided proto-swerve, very quick.
Inspired generations to see what FRC could be like at faster speeds.
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at my first championship in 2016, 971 blew me away. 9 years later it is still my favorite ever
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swerve drive in 2008!? WOW!
I knew some teams attempted a swerve drive before it became the meta, is this the first instance of a swerve drive in FRC?
The first evidence of the swerve drive I could find was this youtube video in 2012 https://youtu.be/kZHaTGiakZM by D’Penguineers (1717)
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1114 2008
This robot almost single handily is what keeps 2008 from being as bad as 2009 and 2010.
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swerve drive actually goes back to the late 90’s - this thread has a bunch of cool examples
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1690 2020/2021. One of the stiffest robots ever that was build so well that it just does what its told to do, enough so to allow automated driving. 1690 also made a bunch of unconventional design decisions to extend their shooter backwards and up, to be the only team who would consistently score the inner goal, which was incredibly hard.
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71 in 2002. If you know, you know.
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Interesting that all three members of the 2008 winning Einstein alliance have been mentioned here.
I vividly recall two of them (148, 217) playing together, and winning, in the Week 1 St. Louis Regional finals. Dave Lavery had come to the event and mentioned that seeing the Thunderchickens hurdle was one of his motivations for the trip. They were one the few teams anywhere to do it well so early that season.
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Watching that Einstein finals live as a freshman changed my life and is something I want all my students to experience
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118 in 2011 for design and inspiration
330 in 2016 for pure audience entertainment, and not just the famous match… The dunk was a lot of fun.
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I get knocked down
But I get up again ….
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Probably 5940 2023. What a beautiful archetype, every time I see that tipped cone handoff work I’m reminded just how awesome it was.
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Definitely Simbot SideSwipe!
Beautiful red powder coating and circular pocketing along with an innovative kiwi drive system 
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I remember watching 217 on practice day and they weren’t great. Thought we had a chance to beat them like we did the year before. Then on comp day they were awesome. I asked Copioli what happened and he told me they were using different drivers in practice to get them experience.
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I agree it was a beautiful robot. And it played the landfill game better than anyone else.
That game gave me a Money for Nothing ear worm tho. About as exciting as stacking boxes in a warehouse. Disrupted by human litterbugs.
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This is all about other teams’ robots, but a personal favorite from my team (8531) was our 2024 Robot.
The last image shows our robot in its infamous “self-destruct mode” at an offseason event. Why did this happen? We had a bad roboRIO and radio. It worked fine, but if we touched anything of any intensity that wasn’t the subwoofer the robot would disable itself. It was also the first year we did swerve, somewhat exciting for us. The intake ended up taking up the front half of the robot, leading us to cram our electronics under the shooter. Unfortunately, there is nothing left of that robot other than our swerve and our bumpers, which we had a hard time making them robust and they were the last things we put on there.
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