Sumo Robot Competition

Last Sumo Webcam Transmission: 07.11.06 - 20:15 Eleni Mokas gloats victorious with "The Restructuring Committee" as the routed Steev Morgan consoles himself and his "Fiasco".

THE SUMO ROBOT CHALLENGE

Since 1992 Norman White has fostered a festival of robotic performance thinly veiled in the garb of Sumo wrestling.

The event has expanded and refined over the years into three events allowing artists, or rather their mechanical surrogates, to strut their stuff in the ring featuring either their strength and endurance, agility and craftiness, or aesthetic movement.

Although autonomous robots are permitted, these pieces are most often controlled directly by their makers. As such these works are more like physical extensions than offspring. They are masks or costumes donned for the dance or the drama.

But again, chaos is the choreographer. As White points out, the robot-building process itself can be seen as complex self-organizing system with the builders themselves playing an integral part. "Given the fact that the strategies of opponents" robots are unknown to a builder until the day of competition, constructing a Sumo Robot is an exercise in preparing for an eventuality where many of the variables are unknown. For such a builder, the cybernetic phenomenon called "feed-forward" becomes as important as the more familiar one called "feed-back".