Bot Wars, the signature event of Engineering Week at UB, filled the Student Union lobby with sparks, smoke and cheers this past Friday.
Many gathered to watch the motorized robots, built by undergraduate engineers, duke it out for the win.
The Society of Automotive Engineers' (SAE) robot, an early favorite, beat the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' (AIAA) bot to win the tournament. AIAA forfeited to avoid further damage to their robot.
"I think SAE had it from the beginning," said Colin Conner, a freshman civil engineering major in the audience.
Sparks flew across the arena as the AIAA robot was flipped over and sliced by the vertical blade of SAE's robot, named "The Punisher."
SAE attributed their win to the robot's composition.
"We do things really simple," said Wesley Burkman, a sophomore mechanical engineering major and member of SAE. "We just have a big chunk of steel spinning really fast. It's really simple and it works every time."
Robots ranged in quality from children's toys outfitted with tin foil to full-blown armored robots with spinning lawn mower blades and hydraulic spears.
According to Jessica James, engineering club coordinator, the robots were limited to four-minute battles.
Guest judges from Fisher Price and Northrop Grumman scored the match based on how many hits each robot took, how many times they stalled and how they withstood other forms of damage. The robot with the lowest point total at the end of each battle moved onto the next round of the tournament, according to James.
Many robots were damaged during the battles and required quick repairs between matches. The American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) managed to win their first match against UB Robotics, but not without significant problems. The spinning bar on the top of the robot stopped functioning properly.
"The torque created by the momentum from the spinning blade from the impact when it hit the Robotics bot must have caused the shaft to bend," explained Steven Makowka, a sophomore chemical engineering major.
The rules stated that the teams were each given one chance to stop the match to assist any immobilized robots.
The ASME robot was not successful in future matches, possibly because the team barely finished it in time for the event, according to Jeremy Marschke, an aerospace engineering graduate student. For this reason, though the robot was formally named "Scary Gary 2.0," the announcer and the crowd referred it to as "The Pile."
Marschke believed the robot could have performed better.
"Our weapon was only spinning at 20 percent of full speed," he said.
Later, while performing a repair between matches, the UB Robotics robot began to smoke, filling the northeast corner of the Student Union with a white cloud.
"We had to switch the motor controllers between...and we had about 30 seconds to do that," said Mike DiSanto, a senior electrical engineering major and member of UB Robotics. "Two batteries ended up getting shorted together."
The tournament ended with a melee match, in which all functioning robots returned to the arena. The UB Robotics robot returned with a fully functional weapon. However, SAE dominated once again, flipping and slicing all other robots in the arena.
"In the end it didn't even break...just one wire melted," Burkman said.
Other E-Week events included the Mr. and Mrs. Engineering Pageant, a pressurized car race and the annual Engineering Ball.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
