By show of hands, who in the audience has been behind the controls of a titanium-armored, flame-throwing combat robot? Just me? Perfect ... my plans for world domination are right on track.
I went to Dallas this past week for
Texas Instruments MSP430 Advanced Technical Conference (ATC) 2006. In other words, "a nerd herd." We talked technology and flashed our bling (gold embossed pocket protectors) for 2.5 days. Grant Imahara, one of the 5 hosts of the popular Mythbusters show on Discovery channel, was the keynote speaker at the conference. He is an electrical engineer from USC and has done some way cool stuff (R2D2 operator, Battlebots winner, authored a combat robot design book, etc) He also did special effects for a countless number of movies while working with
ILM, including Galaxy Quest. I happened to bring that movie to the conference to watch on the airplane, so I asked Grant to sign the DVD case.
Cool, huh?
There was a company attending the conference called Nuvation. They own a combat robot called Texas Heat and Texas Instruments sponsors it. The CEO of the company set up a challenge course to let attendees of the conference test their skills and compete for bragging rights. I allowed a few attendees to go ahead of me to examine what they were doing and how I could do it better. I noticed that Texas Heat was overly responsive to any movements on the transmitter stick. Many people struggled to get the robot into a position to push around the cardboard box. I figured that it might be better to start farther away from the box and accelerate towards it. My plan succeeded. Most people took at least a minute or two to complete the course. I finished in 25 seconds, less than half their times. Even the CEO of the company and one of the principal operators of the robot took 30 seconds to finish. After the competition, the CEO asked me if I worked in the San Jose, CA area and if I wanted to join the combat robot team. Droooooooollllllllllll. Raquelle, pack your bags ... We're Going West!
