I'm a mentor for the local high school robotics competition team, and we just finished competing at the FIRST Southern California Regional Robotics Competition. Here's a link to the local CBS news video:

http://cbs2.com/video/?id=16009@kcbs.dayport.com

The commercial only plays the first time the video is played. We (Beach Cities Robotics, team 294) ended up being eliminated in the quarter-finals in a tie-breaker. The robots have full autonomy as well as a teleoperated mode. They are designed from scratch each year for a new game.

The goal of FIRST is to make fundamental changes in culture and to inspire students to pursue careers in science and technology. We become what we celebrate, so celebrate graciousness and knowledge.

that's a pretty neat contest, makes a change from the fighting robots. Did i catch a glimpse of your back during the video? hair and beard doing a bit more of a crazy scientist thing than in your avatar :0)

Yes, it's constructive. Deliberate ramming or tipping of robots is prohibited. Generally, each year's game features some human-robot interaction. For example, in last year's game, human players could give tetrahedral game objects to robots as shown in this picture:



This year, the interaction was for human players to throw balls into the robots that the robots would later score with.

That bearded guy in the video background isn't me, but a parent of one of the team members.

There are some movies of last year's game action at the link below:

http://teamster.usc.edu/~fixture/Robotics/movies.html