Servo - February 2010

EVENT REP RT: Mayhem in Miami At Mayhem in Miami, it wasn’t without a bang that Fluffy earned the name Flamin’ Fluffy, and made the South Florida robotics event be true to its name.

● by Joey Daoud

from sharpened metal, paper clips, and razor blades, to syringes and metal brushes.

In the end, Columbus took all three places. Forklift, which came in first, had a row of syringes that could be raised or lowered based on the balloon height. Since their first place win at the Miami Science Museum competition, they added a side arm with a syringe that allowed them to continue to pop balloons, even when their opponent was engaging them from the front. Forklift also won Coolest Design for task robots.

In second place was Schwinger — a robot built completely by freshmen — beating out the senior robot R-1 which came in third. However, R-1 did receive the Best Engineering award for task robot.

For the 15 lb. BattleBots competition, there was a strong showing from Ransom Everglades and Miami Lakes Educational Center, with additional robots from Carrollton and Columbus.

Some notable fights were Fluffy (Ransom Everglades) — a rectangular robot with angled sides and a six inch drum with two teeth opposite each other — against Robokill (Carrollton) — a low profile invertible bot with angled ends, similar to a rubber eraser.