Five years ago, on a clear Friday afternoon, I powered on Test Bot 1.0 for the first time. I took it outside, where it promptly got stuck on the (somewhat steep) driveway and didnt have enough motor power to pull itself back up. D’oh.
In many ways, getting a start in ‘bot building has been the best thing to happen to me yet. It has, during the past seven years, always provided me with a direction and a goal. It has taught me to innovate, to think through (and around, under, over…) problems and find solutions. It pushed me to do better every time, to not merely do something for the sake of it. It taught me, or was accessory to teaching me, principles of mechanical engineering and electronics. Rules of thumb acquired only through doing that watching and reading won’t teach you. Most importantly, it helped blaze paths and open doors to opportunities that I can’t even imagine arriving at any other way.
But it has also held me back. The world of fighting robots is a tiny and slowly shrinking one. The technology as well as the technique has almost reached a singularity. I have done almost everything that is required to win. The level of commercialization and simplification of strategy has reached the point that a new builder can construct a winning design right at the outset. This isn’t bad for most other hobbies, but for one centered on destruction, it is detrimental. It tires people out. The innovative designs lose to the simple but effective. There is virtually no motivation to design and implement something more than the most base of designs, because you’re not going to win and it’s not going to last more than one match.
For the past two years, botting has kept me mostly isolated from the wider world of mechatronics and robotics. Even though I felt the pressure to stop at times, even though I saw the decadence for myself, I still kept improving my designs, knowing that anyone with a brushless motor and a slab of hardened tool steel can vaporize them in an instant. Sure, the matches are fun and I enjoy the spectacle of the competitions, but I continued to put off general “robotics” for the next rebuild or design.
There’s absolutely no excuse now. There are simple too many things to do at MIT to warrant standing still or sluggishly dragging myself along. There is so much more I can do with the skill I have already and those I will come to learn and master. Practical things, useful things… revolutionary things… and (duh) things that cause destruction and incite gratuitous violence on a much larger, more spectacular scale.
The combat bots are nice as hobbies, less so as obsessions.
So what is this “second” five year plan? There isn’t one. I could never have predicted my position now from five years ago. The next four years could determine the trajectory of the rest of my life, and it could go any which way. Engineering increasingly requires knowledge of multiple, formerly distinct skills and abilities, and artificial intelligence (however you define it) is permeating things that you couldn’t have guessed even in 1998. I’ll call the Second Five Year Plan when it’s done in 2013. Remind me if I forget.
This doesn’t mean I’ll totally stop building and competing right now. That’s impulsiveness and foolishness to drop everything you know and start over. More likely than not, I’ll focus whatever effort I reserve for the sport into things such as the Sportsman League (even though it, in my opinion, is a rather Enlightment-era-idealistic reaction to the dominance of kinetic energy and armored bricks) and continue attending Robot Battles at Dragon*Con whenever I can. These events restrict the brushless-motor-on-a-stick designs in a variety of ways and encourage builders to keep creating inventive and unique designs. I got my start in competing at D*C 2003, and have too big a fan club there to stop anyways.
Final Grade: B-
Comments: Demonstrating adequate progress, more improvement needed in effort.
