Talk:Robot competition

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 08:15, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 08:15, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

TV Shows
The popularity of the TV shows Robot Wars Robotica and Battlebots, of college level robot-sumo wrestling competitions, the success of "smart bombs" and UCAVs in armed conflicts, grass-eating "gastrobots" in Florida, and the creation of a slug-eating robot in England, suggest that the fear of an artificial life form doing harm, or competing with natural wild life, is not an illusion. The worldwide Green Parties in 2002 were asking for public input on extending their existing policies against such competition, as part of more general biosafety and biosecurity concerns. It appears that, like Aldous Huxley's concerns about human cloning, questions Karel Čapek raised eighty years earlier in science fiction have become real debates. (this comment added by IP user 132.69.234.73 on 11:07, 2 March 2007)

Rewrite / Reorganize
I've made a first pass at rewriting this article to remove the "advertising" aspects and wiki-normalize it. More work is required: to clean it up; incorporate anything new from Robot about competitions, preparatory to slimming down the content in the Robot article itself; and to incorporate treatment of the various television shows, which are equally significant in this field. Comments and help are appreciated.

I have also formed the idea, as noted above, that this listing is best organized in master sections: open competitions, broadcast competitions, university competitions, high-school/children's competitions; and secondarily by format, i.e. ground, aerial, underwater; and then alphabetically. Almost all of the individual entries can be so categorized. Again, comments on this treatment and ways to handle the more comprehensive entries spanning categories are welcomed. Franamax (talk) 01:15, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

I think this was done Franamax, maybe you can remove this bit from here --Raul lapeira (talk) 06:38, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Material moved from Robot
This was the Competitions and exhibitions section from Robot, which is at WP:GAR and needs cleaning up. There are multiple problems here, and I see this Robot competition article already has a "written like an advertisement" tag, so let's get to work on this soon. The first ref is a hacked page, the second ref is an undergraduate curriculum, etc. I personally admire the Society of Robots competition, but it's not widely attended and there's already a link for them at Robot. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:05, 15 September 2008 (UTC)



Competitions for robots are gaining popularity, attracting participation from amateurs, private industry, schools and research institutions. Robots compete at a wide range of tasks including destructive combat, non-destructive combat, fire-fighting, maze solving, performing tasks, navigational exercises (such as the DARPA Grand Challenge), and many others. Some contests require participants to provide tutorials showing how they built and programmed their robot.

Here is an alphabetical list of ongoing, successful competitions and exhibitions.

Botball is a LEGO-based competition between fully autonomous robots. There are two divisions. The first is for high-school and middle-school students, and the second (called "Beyond Botball") is for anyone who chooses to compete at the national tournament. Teams build, program, and blog about a robot for five weeks before they compete at the regional level. Winners are awarded scholarships to register for and travel to the national tournament. Botball is a project of the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, based in Norman, Oklahoma.

The DARPA Grand Challenge has held events since 2004 testing driverless cars in obstacle courses.

The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is a multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem. These teams of mentors (corporate, teachers, or college students) and high school students collaborate in order to design and build a robot in six weeks. This robot is designed to play a game that is developed by FIRST and changes from year to year. FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is an organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen in 1992 as a way of getting high school students involved in and excited about engineering and technology.

FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is a robotics competition for elementary and middle school students (ages 9-14, 9-16 in Europe), arranged by FIRST. Each year the contest focuses on a different topic related to the sciences. Each challenge within the competition then revolves around that theme. The students then work out solutions to the various problems that they're given and meet for regional tournaments to share their knowledge and show off their ideas. The World Festival is held every year in Atlanta.

The FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) is a mid-level robotics competition targeted toward high-school aged students. It offers the traditional challenge of a FIRST competition but with a more accessible and affordable robotics kit. The ultimate goal of FTC is to reach more young people with a lower-cost, more accessible opportunity to discover the excitement and rewards of science, technology, and engineering.

The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) has hosted a yearly student robotics competition every year since 1993, usually in Michigan and usually in early June.

The International Robot Exhibition (IREX), organized by the Japan Robot Association (JARA), has run biennially since 1973.

The Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest competition in April 2007 was the 14th annual event. There are many different divisions for all skill levels. Robots in the competition are encouraged to find new ways to navigate through the rooms, put out a candle and save a "child" from a building. Robots can be composed of any materials, but must fit within certain size restrictions.

Previous and future competitions and exhibitions
The British TV show Robot Wars, in which machines built by amateur hobbyists battle to destroy one another, ran from 1997 to 2003. The machines, however, were radio controlled and had little autonomy.

- Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:05, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Puck Collect

 * Article has no sources and is not notable on its own merits Rogermx (talk) 20:13, 6 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Merge Although even then we need sources. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:57, 6 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Don't Merge  Why clutter a reasonable article with what seems to be an unknown unsourced stub of dubious merit that has not been improved in 6 years?  Is the event more than a "one-off" and is it even still in existence?  The "Puck Collect" stub's only external link is broken.  Wait until "Puck Collect" can be validated as a real event before giving it any further credence by referencing it here.   &#8259;  Fire wall   23:09, 6 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your feedback on this. My first thought was to delete Puck Collect, then I thought a merger might be less severe.  However,  I agree with Firewall on holding off on that.  Rogermx (talk) 13:18, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Puck collecting is common enough as a competition task. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:34, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Don't Merge The problem is the english Wikipedia has no page on "types of competitions", this page (Robot Competition) is not the place for Puck Collect as that is a type of event, not a real event. We could create a page with all the types of competitions in the world and it would not be too long --Raul lapeira (talk) 09:53, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Then start a page on types of robot competition. There are enough of them. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:27, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Suggestion to merge the Robot combat article into the Robot competition article
I think that it would be logical to merge content from the Robot combat article into the Robot competition article.

This is on the basis that the one event that I checked, RoboGames, involves "... combat robots,... sumo bots, and kung-fu".

It seems that the interpretation of "a task", as mentioned at the begining of the Robot competition article, can clearly involve fighting another robot and there doesn't seem to me to be a clear distiction between the contents.

Pinging editors previously involved with the articles:

GregKaye 23:03, 16 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Support User's GregKaye's rationale is pretty clear. Why have redundancy? --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 00:02, 17 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Oppose Looks to me like Robot competition is mostly about completely different kinds of competition from the narrow focus of Robot combat. —Anomalocaris (talk) 05:52, 17 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Oppose The usual goal(s) of Robot competition events is primarily positive task-oriented (for something strictly "non-destructive" - e.g. to solve a problem), while Robot combat is primarily like the gladiatorial combat of the Roman Empire; and done with teleoperated combat robotic devices, primarily meant to defeat each other as the goal. The PIPE (talk) 13:24, 17 November 2019 (UTC)


 * comment, I think I may have got my head around this a bit better now. As far as I see it the main distinction that may be made between the events, if editors want to make one, is that the student and professional competitions may be more likely to involve autonomous or semi-autonomous bots while the combat competitions are more likely to involve weaponised, remotely controlled vehicles.
 * If this is the distinction that editors want to use then I think that it should be presented explicitly. I disagree with above reasoning as I think that some of the autonomous robot combat events could potentially have greatly destructive outcomes while remote controlled events like the Beebs Robot Wars can stop at the point where an opponent is incapacitated even if just by being flipped out of the arena or by non combat induced technical problems.  In the later case there may be nothing to stop an active machine from continuing to attack an incapacitated opponent but not all "operators" are so bent on destruction.  A comparative destructive nature of an autonomous combat robot would depend more on its programming parameters.
 * If the typically remote controled vehicles of current robot combat competitions are considered to be robots then the robot competition article would need to accommodate them and, at some stage in the future, it may need to do so. The robot combat events are predicted to involve increased automisation in future with the proposed distinction becoming blurred.
 * I wouldn't be surprised if some of the robot competitions permitted robots to recieve instructions in the midst of operation and, again, this would leave the distinction blured. I guess that a lot depends on interpretations of "robotics".
 * I'd also suggest that the distinction made in the tables between student/professional participation be changed to a column on entry requirements. If any of the competitions take entrants from people with neither academic affiliation or relevant professional background then this distinction fails.  In comparison, a column on "entry requirements" could contain entries such as "students only", "none" or something else. Rsrikanth05 Anomalocaris The PIPE
 * GregKaye 16:49, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * The longest-running North American robot combat series, BattleBots, is something I've seen since its Y2K beginnings...so when you mentioned "autonomous robot combat events", only ONE BattleBots competitor, the one named Chomp from the later ABC/Discovery Channel 2010s era, whose team was led by one Zoe Stephenson, has ghad any sort of "automation" present in its design; Chomp was outfitted with autonomous steering hardware/firmware that allowed it to automatically face its opponent, with no apparent teleoperator input needed; except to trigger the hammer. (talk) 19:35, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

I've amended the hatnote I added to now read: Perhaps further thought can be given to the distinction between the articles. GregKaye 10:11, 25 November 2019 (UTC)