Robot Gladiator Charity Brawl

50 rocket engineers, 10 battle robots, 60 pints of beer, and $750 for charity

This all started from a meme showing two Roombas upgraded with balloons and knives to battle each other. I shared it with some coworkers and we joked about how it would be fun to do this, but to actually build the robots ourselves. I chose a date and whipped up an email with only the most basic rules:

Overnight we had 15 or so interested folks. To prepare for the event, I hosted a few build sessions. These were basic hackathon format, where we set up camp at tables and all cracked energy drinks and beers late into the night working on our hardware. Each session, the robot army grew in number and lethality.

Leading up to the date we penciled in the original email, I reached out to a local bar about hosting the event. I also picked up some 1x8 boards to erect a safety barrier and protect the shins of bar patrons from possible laceration. Our final event invite was sent out to several teams channels and on a Friday afternoon in June, a crowd gathered to witness the epic struggle for glory:

One of the peak moments was when the tournament's primary threat neutralized itself. One of the teams, having run out of time, went and bought a toy RC car the day of the competition, which was allowed by the extremely lax competition regulations.

The superior, commercially tested speed and controllability of this off-the-shelf solution (named COTS Turbopump) dominated many of the custom designs, some of which struggled to leave their starting positions. However, during the climactic final heat, it rammed full speed into a wood safety barrier and got itself stuck. COTS Turbopump remained pinned for over a minute until another robot that was trying to kill it inadvertently freed it:

The final victor was Bud Carson Middle School's after school STEM program, which received all the proceeds from the tournament!