The kids had to head back to North Carolina for school, but I stayed an extra week in Florida to compete in Robocide 2003, a new competition. Unfortunately, once again I had weird radio problems with Red Menace and went 0-2. After much analysis I found that the battery pack powering the IFI radio in the robot would, if hit in a particular way, go intermittent and lock up the radio. !&#(@!#*@*!!!

I sort of got drafted into doing a lot of videotaping of the competition. My apologies concerning the quality of some of the early rounds, at that point I was using a fixed camera angle high in the corner of the box. I later jury-rigged a camera platform in the corner of the box, and finally broke down and went and bought a cheapo tripod.

But before we get to that, here are some pictures from the competition (the kids belong to my good friends the Greenbergs, btw…)

On to the videos. Here are the competition trees for the 4 weight classes; each class was double-elimination. The winner of each fight is listed in boldface, and if the fight appears as a link, click on it to see video of the fight!

These videos appear by kind permission of Robocide's Big Kahuna, Ken Gentry, who will soon be releasing a DVD set of the competition (using this and other video sources). I will be happy to provide full-size video clips to builders who support Ken by buying the DVD.