There are two parts to the B.E.S.T. robotics competition. The first part is the robot game, in which each team builds a robot to accomplish a task given at the start of the season. The second part is the documentation and marketing side, which mimics the process of a real business selling a machine it is producing.

The robot game this year simulates a “round up” of genetically altered insects that escaped from a lab into a construction zone (represented by the game field shown below). The robots must collect three different types of insects: termites, cockroaches, and flies. The termites are represented by a foot long fabric tube filled with beans. They are located on both near the cross-shaped obstacle and at the base of the shed. The cockroaches are represented by VEX bugs which are about one and a half inches long and contain a motor that allows them to crawl around at a good speed. These are found inside the shed on a table about one and a half feet high. The flies are represented by two 5 inch Styrofoam balls glued together with a ribbon tied around their middle for attachment to the wires from which they are suspended. There are two different types of flies differentiated by ribbon color. Flies with red ribbons are worth fewer points, and are situated on wires from the top of the shed where they hang 2˝-3 feet from the ground. Flies with black ribbons are worth more points and are suspended inside the shed where they slowly rotate around the inside of the shed.

When a robot has grabbed an insect then the robot must try to put the insect into one of three different containment bins, each of which has an obstacle in front of it. The obstacles consist of three different types of construction materials: plywood boards which form a stairway to the bin, PVC pipes arranged in a pyramid shape and held in place so they cannot be moved, and a scrap pile which contains various size two-by-fours fixed to the ground at different orientations. Each bin has a different point multiplier according to how hard it is to get past the obstacle.

There are two team members on the floor with the robot to achieve these tasks. Each stands inside a two and a half by three foot box at the edge of the field. The first team member is a driver, who controls the robot using a remote control. The other team member is a spotter, who acts as a 2nd pair of eyes for the driver so he can see into the shed where his vision is greatly impaired.

The BEST side is split into five main parts, each of which is worth a certain number of points totaling one-hundred. The team produces a project engineering notebook documents the path that we took to design and build the robot. There is a six-person marketing presentation, an oral presentation that mimics a real world marketing presentation. The team creates a marketing exhibit staffed by a group of students who will be interviewed by both the public and a panel of judges. The team is also judged on its enthusiasm and general conduct on Game Day. The robot’s performance in the preliminaries is also important becuase it adds a few points to the total BEST score.