Servo - July 2009

EVENTS

Completed and Upcoming Events

Completed Events for April 13 to May 17, 2009

Kilobots XIII was held on May 16th in Saskatoon, Canada

BOTSIQ 2009 National Competition, BattleBots 2009 High School Championship, Collegiate Championship, and Pro Championships were held in Vallejo,

CA on April 21st.

HORD Spring 2009 was held on May 9th in Brecksville, OH.

Seattle Bot Battle 7 was held on April 12th in, of course, Seattle.

Upcoming Events for Jul-Aug 2009

Gulf Coast Robot Sports- 2 will be held in Bradenton, FL on July 11th.

PA Bot Blast 2009 will be held in Bloosmburg, PA on July 18th. SV

EVENT REP RT:

Ideas Festival, Australia

● by Nick Martin

The Ideas Festival is a government sponsored “future thinking” event held in Brisbane, Australia every three years. The last two events have included a national featherweight robot combat competition organized by the local bot builders. We get the luxury of a

large auditorium with seating for several thousand spectators, a giant overhead video screen, production staff, and an enthusiastic audience.

Day 1

The three day event started on Friday with check-in and safety

PHOTO 1. The arena and auditorium.

inspection. All 22 bots made it through weight and safety, though some were very close on the weight. The competition format was a modified round robin rather than a double elimination so that it could be stretched out to three days. This meant every bot was drawn in every round until it either died or made it to the finals which were single elimination between the top eight bots.

My own bot (Scissorhands) started off abysmally with a receiver failure only a few seconds into its first fight. Other matches were far more exciting, with a nail biting confrontation between PyroBot and Sproing, an