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The Dead Robot Society is a robotics club that is not associated with a specific high school. Instead, we come together from all over northern Virginia, meeting in Herndon in the “Bot Cave” to build, program, and test our robots. We have been creating robots for the annual Botball competition since 2001. The group leader is Tim, who mediates between the software side and the hardware side, because they occasionally have conflicting ideas and epic battles regarding the robots and their strategies. Anthony captains the hardware side, and is joined by Kevin, Matt, and Ryan. Most of the coding is done by Liam, Benjin, and Tim, but Chris, Hannah, and Ben have done quite a bit as well. I, Sam, jump back and forth, gathering information, anecdotes, and quotes in order to capture the moments and progress in the Dead Robots blog.

As a team, we enjoy coding, building, throwing Tribbles at each other, laughing, and eating lots of taquitos. The robots, cleverly referred to as Legobot and Createbot, don’t eat as many taquitos as we do, but they still have fun. Their favorite pastime is rescuing crewmembers, but they get angry when they fall off the bridge. They are also very cranky when they haven’t been charged for a while (imitating their human-student counterparts when they haven’t been fed!). The team works well together: we each have unique skills, but when we collaborate we are able to reach our goals of building skillful robots, learning the mechanical and computational aspects of robotics, and building the simplest thing that could possibly work.