Robot Day

Rich dragged us off to Davis on Saturday to see the robots. He didn't know much about it - just that there would be robots. And vaguely where they would be. So off we went!

Anyway, after a bit of a...well, Rich would call it an adventure, I would call it a frustrating direction-less walk, we found it...on the other side of campus, of course. It was a nice day, otherwise...well, let's just say it would have been ugly. I'm the kind of person who expects that whoever plans an event/trip has actually planned and knows where to go with a minimum of fuss. I am all for going for a walk or hike...but if I'm trying to go somewhere, I get pretty annoyed when we are lost or clearly have no idea where we are actually supposed to be going.

In the end, Rich got his adventure. He even got to use my phone's GPS to get us there. He was like Drew with a new toy and outside. Drew and I were a little tired of wandering around in the sun at noon. Rich got us there, though, and we were greeted with a scene I found nostalgic. A bunch of high school kids, wandering about with parents and support and lots of food, waiting to get into a room. Felt vaugely debate-y. Sigh.

In the building, though, this was the first thing we were greeted with.



I don't recall ever having seen this type of sign at a debate tournament.

Anyway, it was interesting. Very nerdy. It was held in the basketball arena. Half the court was set up with the machine shops.



After checking that out, we wandered around a bit. Drew got a nice assortment of little cars that do the wind up thing when you back them up. Chevron was doing some kind of promo. We also checked out the younger competitions. Apparently there are three divisions. The high school, a middle school, and a division that starts as young as 6 years old! Rich lit up at that and learned all about it. Maybe we'll see if Drew has any interest next year. Right now, we're getting ramped up for soccer starting next month.

Anyhow, we watched a few matches. They were...odd. It took a while to figure out what was going on. There are teams. Two teams of three. Red and blue. The goal being to get as many balls into your team's baskets as you can. To augment things, each robot starts along the edge of the competition space and is lined in front of a human opponent team member who has some balls and may throw them into your basket. (That part was really confusing for a while.) Then while the robots are going, the robots themselves put balls into their opponents' baskets. Some were very effective. Others...didn't appear to be doing much of anything.

Here's the video.