The first War of the Tanks battle

Over the last few months the War of the Tanks teams worked hard to get the tanks up and running for the first battle and on Saturday the 6th of May the moment was finally there.. battle time! More than 30 team members of 9 teams were present with a working tank to, ready to start.

A track was created and the teams were asked to navigate over the track with their tank to record the fastest time. This time was measured with a real Battle Control Center that was running in the cloud (curious about the code? I made it open source on: https://github.com/stefan-kemp/battle-control-center).

There was just one rule: teams were not allowed to use the default remote controller that came in the box. So they had to find a different solution to control the tank and they did. Teams controlled the tanks with x-box controllers, joysticks, mobile phones, tablets and laptops. To make it all work they used a lot of hardware and wrote many lines of code.

In the morning the teams had time to practice on the track and, if needed, to improve their solution. We made the following video while two teams were practicing on the track:

The winners

Team The Outlanders had the fastest time on the track with 29.9 seconds.

Left to right: Tom Cools, Robby Decosemaeker and Chris Declat (not present: Tom Vervoort, Sofiane Chahboun and Nick Michiels)

The team Global Liberation Army convinced the jury that they had made the most beautiful technical solution so they received an additional 7 jury points.

Left to right: Christan Somers, Twan Aarts, Pieter van Dorst and Jack Sierkstra