From Engineering Fails to Epic Wins: Team Valkyrie’s Road to Victory in the BattleBots Arena
How the underdog combat robotics team turned their setbacks into triumph — both in and out of the fighting ring.
On this episode of Hai-er Automation, we step out of the warehouse and into the arena with Team Valkyrie, one of the breakout stars of BattleBots — the hit TV series where teams of engineers, inventors, and tech enthusiasts build destructive robots and go head-to-head to destroy or completely disable their opponents' machines. Host Michelle Dawn Mooney is joined by Leanne Cushing, Bam Singhasaneh, and Alex Crease to talk about what it takes to build, break, and rebuild a 65-pound spinning blade combat robot — and how those lessons apply way beyond the fighting ring.
From crushing setbacks to a massive win at the recent BattleBots Face-Offs, the Valkyrie crew gets candid about failure, pressure, creativity, and the power of turning problems into progress.
Team Valkyrie is sponsored in part by Hai Robotics, as part of Hai’s commitment to investing in the future of STEM.
Hear about:
• The engineering behind Valkyrie’s success — from modular design to strategic problem-solving under pressure
• How failure fuels innovation (and why BattleBots is the ultimate testbed for iterative design)
• The human side of robotics: communication, trust, and teamwork when everything’s on the line
• How combat robotics is shaping the next generation of problem solvers
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