Robot Madness

This afternoon I attended the robot finals at the Drexel basketball auditorium. The competition this year specified a track around which two teams of three robots each whizzed, careened and kiltered, sort of like a mindless roller derby but with machines instead of humans. The task assigned to the robots was laid out sometime in January and the teams had six weeks to design their robot for competition.

The task this year involved four huge balls about the size of a Swedish medicine ball, two red and two blue, perched on top of a 7-foot high jungle gym type rack. The robots got 10 points each for hurling the ball over the rack, 2 points for each lap around the track, and 12 points for leaving a ball resting on the rack at the end of play. There were also 10-point penalties for "line violations", and for intentional ramming, biting and kicking.

The gym was packed with team members, most of them high school students, who had worked on producing the robots. The atmosphere was something like the Hoosier hysteria I remember from school daze in Indiana, only much more intense and a lot more funky. The robot I was supporting -- Dynamoe 365 -- (I had friends on the team) were decked out in fluorescent green jerseys and did this frightening cheer which involved ululating for a bit then clapping rhythmically and shouting "Go MOE!" while pumping their fists in the air.

There was a lot of bizarre line-dancing during the breaks, some of it to that perennial homoerotic favorite "YMCA". Also many truly bizarre costumes -- the MOE team had a fluorescent green giant puppet, reminiscent of Spiral Q or Bread and Puppet Theater.

I was there for the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals. The basic scoring system was easy enough to grasp, but the seeding and team "alliance" scores was about as intricate as the handicapping at a horse-racing track or a high-stakes no-limit Texas Hold 'Em tournament. My robot was allied with one called "Driving Miss Daisy" and one called "Chuck." Other robot team names were "Duct Tape Bandits", "Prosthetic Panthers", "Lunatecs", and "Bay City Rollers".

Fortunately my robot wound up on the winning team. I say fortunate because I had invested several Benjamins in the outcome, and would have been seriously out of pocket had MOE 365 not come through. My robot goes to the National Finals in Atlanta in two weeks.