The Fighting Milkmen began in the summer of 2009 when Tim decided he wanted to go beyond FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics and make a combat robot. He got together with some other mentors from the Southington, CT FIRST team and formed a combat robotics team.

    Now, you may be wondering why our team name is The Fighting Milkmen. It all started in Gino & Sandra’s living room during one of the first meetings. We decided to be random and exciting by using a random name generator to suggest a team name for us. We went through hundreds of ridiculous team names and landed on “The Fighting Milkmen.” Why did we choose it? It made us laugh. What sealed the deal: a YouTube video called Milkman vs. Mailman (YouTube Link). Thus, we became The Fighting Milkmen combat robotics team.

    Our first robot, “AnkleBiter,” was in the 60 lb. class. It was made in Lance’s machine shop, Tiger Enterprises. When it was complete, we all flew out to San Mateo, CA for the RoboGames 2010 competition. The robot was driven by Dave, who was also the driver on the high school FIRST team for several years. We did pretty well. We placed 6th out of the 21 teams in our weight class. Our robot survived with relatively low damage, and of course we left a few battle wounds on some of our competitors.

    When we came back from RoboGames 2010 with a few pieces of our competitors’ robots, we decided that we really liked the combat robotics thing, and we wanted to build a few more robots! We first changed Anklebiter’s name to Vitamin D (D for DEATH!); which was also influenced by the Milkmen vs. Mailman video). We then started to manufacture a 3 lb. robot named Skim, whose first competition was at NERC Franklin Institute 2010 in Philadelphia, PA.

    At the current time, we are continuing to grow our team. We currently have 15 members and will more than likely be looking for more milkmen in the future. New positions on the team continue to open up as we move forward with building our robot family. As mentioned on our home page, we also sponsor the Southington High School FIRST Robotics FRC team, The CyberKnights, by supplying engineering mentors and machine time to manufacture robot parts. We hope to see you in competition, or (if you're not a robot builder) cheering us on! You can check out our robots here.