Features / robotics
Pints, pizzas and robot fighting
“We basically describe it as Robot Wars, but scaled down,” says Joe Brown, pointing to the robots at the Bristol Bot Builders headquarters in Lawrence Hill. Bot builders, a passion project (and now a part-time job) is based out of a small room above Pirate Studios and has big ambitions.
Joe Brown, University of Bristol graduate in Electronic Engineering and Craig Croucher, a physics teacher who completed his PCGE at the same university, together manage Bristol Bot Builders and Incredibots.
Craig Croucher and Joe Brown of Bristol Bot Builders
Bristol Bot Builders is the collective started by members of the University of Bristol’s Electronic Engineering Society and UWE Bristol’s Robotics Society for passionate robot builders and fans of Robot Wars throughout the South West. The group puts on regular events and members support each other, offering advice and recommendations.
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Incredibots is the educational side of the group. Joe and Craig provide workshops that give people the chance to design, build and compete with their own combat robots in a custom arena.
The educational scheme offers parties, after school and classroom workshops and company events. “It’s 100 per cent the best bit,” says Joe. “The outreach in schools is so important, and we get the most buzz from it.”
Joe and Craig have just returned from a workshop at Fairfield School and excitedly explain more: “We give them lolly pop sticks and glue guns. They get to learn the basics of electronics and design.”
The workbench in the Lawrence Hill headquarters
What about encouraging more girls to get involved in engineering? “We want to inspire others,” says Craig. “We want to get more women into STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) as it’s traditionally so white and male.”
Craig gestures to a pink contraption in the corner of the workshop. The ‘Two-Headed Death Flamingo’ is a splash of hot pink and Joe explains more: “This is the big one. This is the size of the robots on Robot Wars. There’s not enough pink robots, we thought we’d take the most flamboyant, extravagant, pink animal and make it into an eye-catching robot.”
It takes three people to control it, one for each head with another person operating the wheels. “This the one we use in competitions,” Joe says.
The Robot Wars-esque competitions take place around the country, but often in uninspiring leisure centres.
Joe says: “We got bored of leisure centres, so since March we’ve been organising smaller versions in pubs.
“We wanted to Bristol it up! Pints, pizza and robot fighting – all the best things.”
Joe and Craig describe Bristol as an “epicentre of robot fighting”, and with their expanding outreach work, the next robot fighting event in June and a spot at Cheltenham Science Festival, they aren’t wrong.
Find out about Incredibots and and Bristol Bot Builders at www.incredibots.co.uk and www.bristolbotbuilders.com. Find out about their upcoming events at www.bristolbotbuilders.com/events
Read more: Shaping the future of tech
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