Robots are usually designed to be useful, but an amateur robotics competition last weekend indulged in technology gone wrong.
Organised by in Boulder, Colorado, the mischievously subverts Isaac Asimov鈥檚 Three Laws of Robotics, one of which states that a robot must protect its own existence.
Instead, the competition challenged people to build a robot that attempts a simple, menial task but fumbles it or fails, before destroying itself. Participants could either submit their entries as a video, or present their creation live, at an event on 16 October.
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Spectacular failures
The winning video (see above) features a teddy bear birthday party, where a robot tries to cut a cake, but instead emits a spark that sets fire to itself and its fellow diners 鈥� a toy bear and a clown. In another, fails spectacularly to make a cr猫me br眉l茅e, by misdirecting its cooking blowtorch.
According to Peter Dokter, one of the organisers, the live entries were just as self-destructive, but because of fire regulations most of them involved mechanical deaths. 鈥淥ne of the participants perched a robot on top of a clothes dryer. It knocked cans of Pringles chips into it, inadvertently fell in, then got completely wrecked by the machine,鈥� he says.
Spark of genius
SparkFun hopes to run the competition again next year with more participants. 鈥淭he design doesn鈥檛 need to be complicated, you just need to create something that shows a bit of cleverness,鈥� says Dokter. 鈥淭here are lots of creative ways to destroy something.鈥�
