We are happy to announce that our time at competition was extremely successful! Being extremely eventful, we could go on about it for ages, but we’ll keep it brief enough. On Friday, April 4th, we drove down to Rocklin, California for Sacramento Bot Battles. This was a drive of a few hours, but we all made it soon enough. That night, we completed our weight and safety checks at Sierra College, which is where the event was, and prepared for the competition. PLANT teams ensured that all of their bots were set up and working while the 15lb teams toiled away at their tables.
The next morning, we prepared for our fights and eventually got started. To put it simply, we got second and fourth place in the National Robotics League (NRL) 15lb competition, and the PLANT teams did very well too, especially since most of them had no experience prior to this year. In fact, one of our team members got first with “Cement Sam” in the plastic antweight 1lb competition (center in picture), winning out over battle-proven bots which had been to many other events.
Angular Aggression won the first three of its fights definitively before losing to Lunar Eclipse, a control bot. This bot got first place in this competition by leveraging its extremely powerful claw. While we got in some good hits, we ultimately lost to them twice. The first time, we chose to stick with the short fork config, which meant that there was a chance of getting stuck in the wall. And indeed, this is what happened. We got stuck in the wall twice, using up our one unstick for the round. This moved us down to the losers bracket, where we again faced Neo. Fortunately, though, we won decisively for the second time. Although we were successful with Neo, we still lost to Lunar Eclipse again in the finals. This time, we lost for a combination of reasons. Their forks managed to get under our wedge, and we lost weapon power. While we were flipped upside down, we also lost drive. We have several theories for why these failures may have happened. The wheels may have stripped, the electronic speed controllers (ESCs) may have overheated, and some of the wires may have been damaged.
REV 3 was also very successful, winning the most destructive bot award after its stunning match against Master Oogway, which was totally destroyed. Like Angular Aggression, REV 3 lost to Lunar Eclipse, but it also lost to Neo. Had it not lost, it would have had to battle Angular Aggression in the finals of the losers bracket. Below are a few images (of thousands that we took) of Angular Aggression and REV 3 battling other bots. Also attached is the 15lb bracket – all tournament information can be viewed at https://challonge.com/SacBotBattles2025_NRL and https://challonge.com/SBB25_Plant. See a montage video here https://youtu.be/_aBudRrYKRo. Due to the sheer destructive power of both Angular Aggression and REV 3, the SBB arena now requires major upgrades for next year, and a weapon speed limit may be implemented!
Now, perhaps the most exciting news of all! By scoring in second place, we’ve qualified for next month’s national championship in Springfield, Ohio. We plan to go, but we have a lot of work to do. We’ve identified several issues and inefficiencies in both bots which we must resolve, and we likely need to order some spare components (however, in this competition AA required only one battery change, one minor spare part (fork holder), and no other repairs). We’ll provide another update after that competition, if we make it happen. And as always, we remain immensely grateful for our generous sponsors, as they help to fund our bots and expensive trips like these! See the “support us” page for more information!