Posted: My first year, 2009, the challenge was called Lunacy, and it was aptly named. The basic premise of the game was to pick up these strangely shaped balls and dump them in trailers pulled by your opponents, all the while driving on a super-slick surface with super-slick wheels. The lack of traction was supposed to simulate less gravity on the moon, since it was the 50th year anniversary of the lunar landing. In short, we didn’t do so well. The team was still fairly new (only one member had more than a year of experience) and we bit off a little more than we could chew, resulting in a robot that was…less than perfect.
I’ve seen many echoes of Lunacy in this year’s game, Rebound Rumble, not just in the similarity of the game, but also the way we’ve been building the robot, as well as the experience of the team. I’ve nearly laughed out loud as so many components and ideas from 2009 have been implemented in our design (such as the slick wheels that I never expected to ever use again), and I’ve thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be poetically awesome if we end up taking past experience from my first year, the year we all joke about because of its…well…failures, and apply what we learned to make a winning robot this year, my last year on the team?” This year is in many ways like my first year, with our team’s lack of experience and effort to go for everything, but I have a feeling we’re going to “Rebound” from our previous “Lunacy” and make a rumbling comeback worthy of poetry.
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