RoboGames was last weekend, both Matt and I brought our droids on Saturday and I soloed the event on Sunday. As usual the place was packed with people and all things robotics, from 200lb fighting battlebots to more peaceful robots that fold your laundry.

One of the highlights for me was getting to talk with the Mech Warrior guys. They had some of the most sophisticated robots in the competition, and had developed some interesting control techniques I’d like to try on R2 sometime soon.

Here’s one of their bots traversing their mini city hunting down it’s prey – bb-guns at the ready.

These bots are huge, here’s a shot next to R2 for scale

I got to hang out with Grant Imahara from Mythbusters (and an ILM alumni). He graciously spent over an hour signing and taking photos with his fans for free. And Artoo stood by entertaining the crowd while they waited.

Helping the Mech Warriors was Fon Davis, model maker extraordinaire, also an ILM alumni, who among many other things worked on repairing/painting the original OT droids for the Prequels. He also built the mini city arena for the Mech Warriors, and had some MORAV models on show – he also graciously offered to keep and eye on my stuff – Thanks Fon 🙂

This is the PR2 robot , some of you may have seen recent videos of it on YouTube performing all sorts of complicated tasks, like folding your laundry.

As usual there was a lot of kids at the event

This little girl was very enamored with all things Artoo. Matt was very gracious and allowed her to control some of the sounds on his droid, and she followed us around for a big part of the afternoon. I’m pretty sure we have a couple of droid builders in the making with her family.

I had my fair share of scared kids but this was my only crier for the weekend – I normally get at least a couple more.

This woman appeared from nowhere to grab her chances at a photo. I’m not sure if Artoo or I was more frightened what she was going to do next

This is my most favorite shot of the weekend I found on flickr. Titled “R2R2 – A kid admires a pair of Artoos while his dad admires their makers.”. Original photo by Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com.

Related:

• BarBot 2010
• BarBot 2010 News Video
• RoboGames 2009
• RoboGames 2008 Report

I’m really not sure where to start with my RoboGames coverage – the weekend was jammed packed full of interesting people and cool things – like talking with the machinist who worked on the NPC motors many of us use in our droids, to hanging out with the Orb Swarm folks or Grant Imahara from Mythbusters, or getting some inside info from the engineer who maintains the machines that spin our aluminum domes. Artoo even got in on some battle bot action in the arena and lived to tell the tail.

The event is held at Fort Mason in San Francisco each year and attracts thousands of people from all over the world. I was in attendance all 3 days with support from my friend Richard, and Gerard was there on Saturday with his R2.

The games themselves cover everything from the traditional battle bot arena tournaments, to robot soccer and sumo fighting. There are also special categories for art and bar tending robots. Maybe next year I’ll enter Artoo into the latter. In total there were 70 different competitive categories.

Artoo was a big crowd pleaser as usual, and many photos were taken with his admiring fans. My favorite was this one I found on Flickr by inkyhack.

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