Build Your Own Combat Robot

if your opponent moves too close, your robot will back away from it. Using this type
of system, you can keep your opponent inside the “sweet spot” of your robot’s
weapon’s strike zone. This type of system can be advantageous against the aggressive
spinning robots. You can automatically keep your distance from the dangerous
spinning weapons and focus your efforts on hitting the top of the spinning robot
with your bot’s axe or hammer.
Autonomous Target Tracking
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, fully autonomous robots are not
easy to build with vision capabilities—the most difficult aspect of such system design.
In the semiautonomous section, you learned about a few simple methods for
a robot to “see” an opponent when it is close to your robot. But this robot still
needed the human operator’s eyes to get the job done.
Fully Autonomous Robot Class
Chapter 11: Autonomous Robots 253
In the early years of robot combat at Robot Wars, a fully autonomous class of
combat robots existed. To account for safety, in 1996, specific rules were written
about autonomous robots by Bob Gross. The key element to these rules is the use
of an infrared beacon. The robots must be programmed to attack the beacon only,
and they must ignore everything else. This way, the robot won’t attack a person.
These beacons were issued to the robots by the event coordinators prior to the
event. The dimensions of the beacons were 3.5 inches in diameter and 6.5 inches
tall. The beacons were made of durable ABS plastic. Inside the beacon were
twenty, 880-nanometer, infrared, light emitting diodes (LEDs) that provided infrared
light 360 degrees around the beacon in the horizontal plane and 18 degrees
in the vertical plane. The infrared light had a carrier frequency of 40 kHz with a
superimposed modulation frequency. Each beacon had its own modulation fre-
Safety First
Before we discuss how to get two robots to “see” each other, we must talk about
safety. In all robot combat events, safety is the number-one concern. Most combat rules
and regulations are written to protect humans from getting injured by a robot. Things
like failsafes, automatic shutoffs, and manual kill switches come into play. Imagine a
robot that is programmed to attack anything that comes close to it. After the match
is over, who is going to walk up to the robot to shut it off to take it into the pits for
repairs? If the robot is programmed to attack anyrobot that gets near it, how will
it tell the difference between a human and another robot? It probably won’t, and it
will attack anyhuman, or robot, that approaches. Because of this potential danger,
some contests prohibit fully autonomous robots. For safety purposes autonomous
robots must have a remote control kill switch to remotely shut the robot down at
the end of a match or in emergency situations.