Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
Yesterday, the hosting company Schuberg Philis organised a LEGO day at its offices for all the employees and, of course, the kids. It was split into two parts, downstairs they had prepared a large auditorium with big tables full of LEGO for the younger kids and upstairs we had the “board room” for robot building workshops.
After a rocky start where Eric was thoroughly confused trying to rebuild Vassilis C’s (Nextstorm) boxing robots, we prepared the room with laptop and a tonne of Technic LEGO parts and NXTs for people to build robots.
The original idea was that there would be sumo matches between teams but things took a different turn.
People seemed to just do their own thing, build robots, program line followers, Martijn, Eric and I just helped when and where we could and let things take their course. I think fun was had by all but I think in all we had only a few true sumo matches during the whole day. I witnessed one of them, which was an epic battle between the robot you see on the right and a standard sumo robot that Martijn built. It had rather scary looking antlers and a some spinning blades on the front that would lift and push the opponent out of its way. Its owner was as proud as a peacock, of course, and was more than happy to pose with his creation.
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| The demo room where we had a couple of robots on display for people to play with and look at. | The sumo building room. Lots of dads and their kids building robots. |
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| A line following robot, programmed in ROBOTC. | Three sumo robots that actually ended up competing, very cool! |
It was a real blast and fun was had by all!
Very cool what you guys set up!
Rebounding from “All work and no play …,” Schuberg Philis breaks out of the box and enters into the world of “mission critical” LEGO Mindstorms Robotics. I believe that this was one of the first critical steps of moving LEGO Mindstorms from the toy stores and into the boardroom. I have long thought that Mindstorms could be a valuable tool in teaching corporate HR courses to management, like the “Building Bridges” courses of the 1980s. The sets are on the table, now all we need is a clever HR consultant to come in and build some management courses using Mindstorms to teach managers as well as letting them have some fun on occasions. Well done, even of the start was rocky.
The rocky start was a tongue-in-cheek remark where we were making fun of Nextstorm’s robot building abilities, which are, in fact, pretty amazing 🙂