Four teams from the LSU College of Engineering will pit 30-pound robots against one another on Tuesday at the university’s first-ever “Bengal Bot Brawl,” with an all-expenses paid trip to Atlanta on the line to compete in the Robot Battles at MomoCon.
The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Patrick F. Taylor Hall Commons. Area high school students are also being invited so they can get a look at the university’s engineering college and robotics program.
“We intend for this event to be an annual event that people look forward to attending each year,” says LSU Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department Chair Dimitris Nikitopoulos in a news release.
The competition will feature “intense one-on-one mechanical matchups,” LSU says, in a round-robin format with a final bout between the top two teams. According to the competition’s rules, the winning team’s robot must incapacitate an opponent or push it off the combat stage.
Three of the four LSU teams readying to engage in the battle are senior Capstone Design teams featuring mechanical, electrical and computer engineering students, while the four team is from the student robotics organization, Bengal Reauxbotics.
The last team standing in the inaugural robotics battle will go on to fight at the 2017 MomoCon, an anime and animation convention being held in Atlanta in late May. With more than 60 events held in the U.S. and Europe, Robot Battles bills itself as one of the oldest continuously running robotic combat competitions in the world.
