Susan Reno, Fierce Engineer, has just sent in this dispatch from Mumbai’s Techfest!

Through the machinations of Mr. Robotics and the kind organizers of Techfest, she and a group of folks from all over the world (well, San Francisco, Seattle and Australia) met in Mumbai to fight 30 and 60 pound robots.

Yes! Yes, people do still do that, even if it’s not on TV any more! For a complete listing of competitions and upcoming events, see The Robot Fighting League website.

Last night was awesome. We started setting everything up at about 5:45 for our 6:30ish show. They put us on a stage for our pit and built a ramp down to the 16×16′ arena.

They had fireworks, flame throwers and confetti cannons set up all around the outside of the arena as well as the stage. BeerBot [Susan and her teamates have built a 60lb robot our of an old beer keg] fought twice. Both times with Joe’s 60 lbers.

Now before i tell you what happened in the ring I will need to preface it with what Joe told me yesterday morning. Remember when Speed Bump [one of Joe's other robots] backed off of Enoch [another of Susan's robots] and we tapped out [at Robogames 2006]? Well. . .Speed Bump was dead. He had no movement. He wasn’t giving us a chance to survive. He was bluffing. Joe looked over at us in hopes that we would tap out.

This made my blood boil a bit, but I kept my composure and took my revenge knowing full well we are a good 10 lbs overweight.

I creamed him.

The matches went way longer than 3 minutes and there was no timer. . . BB has a lot of battery power so I decided to use most of it up on showing him who boss. I’m not vengeful at all.

Because I spent most of my power in the first match, I lost the second just ’cause I ran out of batts.

BB’s first fight needed to be a crowd pleaser anyway. We got off to a really slow start. The first 2 robots hit like twice, then played dead. Not a good sign. I thought the crowd was bored.

Andrew, the guy from austrailia won hands down. He has two POWERFUL pneumatic 30lbers. They are awesome. I hope he can come to Robogames sometime.

So, the last fight was a grudge match with 3 30 lbers. . . Andrew just killed everything then did a victory dance, it was great (during all the fights the
pyrotechnics, fire and confetti are all randomly scaring us with their loud booms).

The crowd seemed pleased, but i didnt theink they were that into it until the fights were over and everyone rushed the stage! I was signing autographs, answering questions and taking pictures with people (see also: MOB SCENE). . .

We were totally rockstars.
We were escorted out ’cause people kept stopping us.
It was insane. The crowd was NOT bored.
We had dinner at the on campus resturant and then to sleep.
‘Twas a busy day.

Thanks for writing in Susan, we expect some pix and vids soonish, stay tuned. . .

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Robot Combat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.