BattleBots IQ : April 2004

“The box is locked, the lights are on, it’s robot fighting time!” Many will tell you the experience of BattleBots is both rare and amazing. While motors are smashed, and batteries light on fire, you take home much more than twisted metal and burnt speed controllers. The learning experience is priceless, and irreplaceable. The entire process of building a BattleBot takes much more than engineering and physics skills, it requires ingenuity, creativity, determination, ambition and lots of teamwork. After exercising each of those skills for four grueling months of designing and building our first BattleBot, the Kerminator, Mean n’ Green is more excited and determined to build an undefeatable robot for next year.

The Kerminator originated as a wedge, but after hours of fiddling with the design and re-evaluating our weight, our design was finalized as a pentagon with a jagged steel wedge as the “tail” and a bright red 10 inch saw as the “tongue” spinning at almost 4480 RPM, along with two Styrofoam domes with red LEDs for eyes as decoration. The building process was long and would often last late into the night, but with the help of caffeine and Disney tunes we managed to finish our robot on time (a feat that was accomplished by very few teams from our shop, most teams resorting to finishing their robots in the pits at the competition.)

We arrived in Owatonna, Minnesota at 11:15pm on a Tuesday night. At first the town had little to offer to a group of city dwelling girls. The next morning, however, the scene changed. Upon arrival at the Owatonna arena, we were greeted with over 75 teams of enthusiastic robot builders. Each team had an individual and unique design. There were local teams and teams that had traveled from Texas, Massachusetts, Florida and New York.

The Kerminator fought four matches, and won two of them. One match was against Manta, another Carrollton team – equipped with actual manta ray skin for protection. But the amphibian proved victorious over our water dwelling friend. The second match won was against D-monic, a flipper robot driven by two high school boys donning large yellow foam cowboy hats. The next match was the next day, against Chrome Dome, a large spinner. Mean n’ Green used the idle time between matches to modify our spinner and wedge so as to absorb more impact from the spinner, while Chrome Dome added extra chunks of metal to drive into the Kerminator. Chrome Dome’s extra chunks of metal ripped off both of Kerminator’s wheels and left the team scrambling to replace them in time for the next match. Once the wheels were replaced, our fourth and final match was against PlasticBot; the 2002 Third Place winner. PlasticBot managed to disable the Kerminator’s receiver leaving the robot immobilized. Later, the Kerminator fought two rumbles (wherein 4-8 robots duke it out in the BattleBox at once) where it finally suffered it’s first damage to the frame when it was pushed under the hammers, the steel frame bent, the eyes where smooshed, and the hammers left their very large imprint on our Lexan armor.

Although we came home with cracked Lexan, a bent frame, and a few unfulfilled goals; we also came home with a lot more experience, many new friends, and oogles of inspiration and excitement for next year.

UM/Battlebots IQ 15 LB Competition : Febuary 2005

MNG brought a 15 lb self destructing bar spinner to the 2005 Innaugural UM/BBIQ 15lb division competition. The robot was named "Commander K9" after Marvin the Martian's trusty best friend. While Commander K9 was not as succesful as his best friend Marvin, he did end in flames in what was considered "the most impressive display of electrical fireworks" of the competition. Commander K9's spinning blade was discovered to be unbalanced on the day of competition. Albeit the efforts made to hammer the blade into balance, it still did not work and upon K9's first spin up in the test box, K9 flipped himself over.

BattleBots IQ : April 2005

We came home from Orlando with 11th place and ranked higher than any Carrollton team before us. After experiencing tremendous difficulty with our drive motors and being fairly dissapointed with the performance of our weapon motors we managed to repair and rescue enough parts to win 4 matches in a row. On the way to our 6th match, a cloud of smoke began seeping out of Marvin - which we later found out came from our batteries. They spontaneously lit themselves on fire. We were given 3 hours to sanitize and rebuild our robot from scratch. Unfortuneately we finished 5 minutes too late to compete and were forced to forfeit our last match.