The University of Florida's Marston Makerspace held a Crappy Robots event where teams had to use motors and battery packs to get a robot across a five-foot plank without falling off. Participants built everything from an alligator robot to a caterpillar-style machine and robots with spinning arms.

One participant even argued that the rules never said the whole robot had to reach the end, then tried to catapult just a piece of it down the plank. The event rewarded improvisation, loopholes and gloriously imperfect machines.

Silly Robots Contest is a San Francisco event where the goal is not usefulness or commercial value, but simply making people laugh. Entries are invited to be whimsical, silly, funny or completely unnecessary, with the event scheduled for September 10, 2026.

The call explicitly welcomes “cursed kinematics,” “unnecessary degrees of freedom” and “beautifully overengineered mechanisms,” celebrating robots that move in the opposite direction from conventional performance competitions.