Life as a Robot Carny

I mentioned last post that I have been playing around with robotics for a number of years.  It got started on a trip to England where my middle son and I were enthralled by the British Robot Wars show.  

This started an interesting involvement with robotic combat here in the states.  One of the more fun events I was involved with was doing robotic demonstrations at first the Minnesota, and later the South Carolina State Fairs.  

I still have one of the robots shown in the video, Newton's Claw, hiding in my garage in case anybody needs mid sized appliances vaporized.

Watch for the part where the kid is driving the teeny RC car trying to flee the killer robots in pursuit.  If he survived two minutes he got to keep the car.  If not, he got the pieces.

In case you are curious, this was a lot of hard work.  It was hot.  The bugs were huge.  There were constant issues keeping robots running and the arena fought us on every occasion.  But the biggest problem we ran into was finding enough microwaves, dishwashers and fax machines to keep smashing!

On the other hand, there were some really nice church ladies on the setup day who gave us all free box lunches and lemonade.  A Ministry to the Carnys I guess.

I have always thought that when you can put Robot Carny on your resume you might as well just print up a lifetime supply of them, as you have clearly reached an Olympian height you are unlikely to exceed.