Build Your Own Combat Robot

212 Build Your Own Combat Robot
Strategy
Launchers
You must keep leverage in mind when designing a lifter. It does no good to have
enough power to pick up an opponent if your robot falls forward while doing so.
Because you are usually not trying to get your opponent off the ground, but instead
trying to get them off balance, the down force on your arm will need to be
only about half your opponent’s weight. Still, you should design your lifter to be
able to lift the entire weight of your opponent, if not more, in case you need to lift a
target with an unusually off-center center of gravity (CG). Having part of your robot’s
frame extend forward will give you more leverage to avoid tipping forward,
but you should also consider the effect of that extra force pressing the front of your
robot into the ground. The best lifter designs place drive wheels as forward as possible,
flanking the lifting arm, to take advantage of the extra traction possible from
having part of an opponent’s weight resting on them. The exposed arm of the lifter
is its most vulnerable part. A severe collision or strike by a spinner can bend the
arm, making it useless. On better-defended lifters, the arm retracts into an armored
wedge front when completely lowered, exposing the arm only to lift when the
wedge has already gotten under the opponent.
Lifters rarely damage the opponent by themselves; instead, the lifter strategy is
to take advantage by getting the opponent’s drive wheels off the ground. Many
lifter matches are won with no damage being inflicted to either robot, instead
leaving the losing bot flipped over or the match being decided by judges rather
than by a disabled losing bot.
The lifter is strongest against opponents that rely on traction to fight, such as
wedges and rammers. Robots with overhanging enclosed shells will be easy targets
for a lifter because it can immobilize them by simply tilting one side up enough to
lift their wheels off the ground. A lifter relies on being able to get the arm seated
under an opponent firmly enough to lift, and it is against spinning robots that lifters
have their hardest time winning. Many spinners have enough kinetic energy in
their shells or spinning appendages to knock a lifter aside on contact, and unless
the lifter can somehow stop a spinner’s rotation, the lifter will simply take blow after
blow until one robot breaks. Thwack bots are also tough opponents for lifters, as
their wild spinning and invertable, open-wheeled design make it difficult for a
lifter to get into a position to knock the thwack bot’s wheels off the ground.
This design was first used on Recyclopse (Robot Wars UK, 1997). Other bots using
this design include Toro, T-Minus, Hexadecimator, and Chaos II. The launcher
features an actuated arm that’s powered by extremely high-flow-rate pneumatics,
capable of launching the unlucky opposing robot high into the air.