Build Your Own Combat Robot

Strategy
Chapter 10: Weapons Systems for Your Robot 207
Pushing Robot A similar form to the ramming robot is the pushing robot. The
pushing robot concepts are similar to ramming robots, but they are focused more
on traction and torque than speed. A pushing robot is usually designed to take advantage
of traps and hazards built into the arena. Rather than try to damage the
opponent through impacts, they simply use their pushing power to herd their opponent
around the floor. While speed is not as important as in a pure ram design, a
pusher should not be too slow, lest its opponent simply drive away. Many pushers
use bulldozer blades or scoops, placing them more in the category of wedge robots.
The ramming design is best against rotary weapons—spinners, saws, and drums.
With no fragile external mechanisms, a strong frame, and the ability to take solid hits,
a ramming robot can keep hitting a spinner until the spinner self-destructs. This
design is weakest against an opponent that can lift its drive wheels off the ground. A
wheel and chassis design that lets the ram still have two wheels on the ground even
when one side is lifted will help this design get free from wedges and lifters, but being
grabbed and lifted by a clamp bot will render a ram bot completely helpless. Use
speed and lots of driving practice to keep that from happening to your robot.
The real weakness of a ram bot is its inability to knock out most opponents conclusively.
With a ram bot, your victory can come by knocking out a weakly-built
robot in a collision, causing a spinner to knock itself out, or winning on judge
points. When against an opponent built well enough not to be knocked out, and
capable of damaging, flipping, or lifting the ram bot, the ram bot design will have
a hard time winning.
Using (and Abusing) the Rules
If you look at the current crop of combat robots, you will see that conforming
to the rules does not preclude creativity or battle-worthiness. Check out Team
CoolRobots (www.coolrobots.com) headed by the highly imaginative Christian Carlberg.
Carlberg’s robot Minion won the Super Heavyweight title at BattleBots in 1999, and
his other entries such as Dreadnought and Toe-Crusher are excellent examples of
robots that not only conform to the rules but are also pretty darned effective as
metallic harbingers of destruction.
The best way to show how to use the rules as the guideline that they were
meant to be is to take you from inspiration to creation of a robot that won “most
aggressive” at a recent BattleBots competition. One would assume a robot whose
inspiration came from watching trench diggers and gigantic bucket-wheel excavators
in action would have a hard time conforming to the specifications laid out in the manuals.
However, Jim Smentowski’s Nightmare passed muster with the rules lawyers. His
210-pound killing machine features a spinning blade that can deliver a 300-MPH
uppercut to its opponents. Because the robot’s main weapon is a spinning blade,
it had to adhere to the rules regarding robots with spinning parts.
—Ronni Katz