Our North Tampa Robotics club just finished our SUMO competition last night. Eight teams competed for glory in a heated competition. I want to recognize all of the teams who participated – they all worked really hard building and refining their robots!

Armored Panzer Division – Bennett and Kevin
Tank Masters – Amilio and Alex
The Twisting Tornadoes – Trevor and Manat
Mbotm Bots – Will and Lleyton
Savage Sadie
Mad Marcy
Raging Ross
Hulkbots – Logan

Congratulations to our tournament champions!

Gold – Mbotm bots (Will and Lleyton)
Silver – Armored Panzer Division (Bennett and Kevin)
Bronze – Mad Marcy
Bronze – Tank Masters (Amelio and Alex)

I would like to recognize Greg Call who hosted a SUMO competition earlier this year in Stuart, FL. I wrote my own rule book using his rules as a starting point.

Robots were limited in weight to 1 KG and by size to 9 inches square with no height restriction. All robots were constructed using only LEGO parts with one intelligent brick per robot.

The basic format of the tournament is patterned after fencing tournaments with an initial pool round followed by a single elimination bracket. For the pools, competitors compete against every member of their pool. Each round is comprised of three encounters with two points possible per encounter (2 for an outright win and 1 each in the case of a tie). This gives six possible points per round.

Once the pool results are tallied, the bracket is seeded based on three criteria.

1. Average points per round calculated as a competitors total points divided by the number of rounds they participated in. If all pools are of equal size, you can just use total points.
2. The first tie breaker is the average time to win. Calculate this by adding up time it took a bot to win (ignore losing encounters) and divide by the number of encounters won. Lower times are better
3. The final tie breaker is based on robot weight. This only came into play for bots without any wins but did come into play. Lighter robots are better.

Once the competitors were seeded into the elimination bracket, we had a quick elimination round with the final four competitors all receiving awards.

I was so busy officiating, I never go to take any pictures. Please comment with your pics and I’ll get them online!

I did capture some photos of the work in progress over the last few weeks. Enjoy!