Featured This Month:
Features
26 BUILD REPORT:
An Introduction to Wedges
by Thomas Kenney
28 MANUFACTURING:
Attaching Wheels to Your
Robot’s Drill Motors
by Ken Brandon
30 HISTORY REPORT:
Robotic Competition,
Southern Style
by Kelly Lockhart
31 PARTS IS PARTS:
Flipper Calculators Turn
“Cut and Try” (nearly) into
Science by Kevin Berry
33 Cheap Speed
by John Frizell
Events
29 Dec 2008/Jan 2009 Results
and Mar/Apr 2009 Upcoming
Events
ROBOT PROFILE – Top
Ranked Robot This Month:
35 Ziggy by Kevin Berry
26 SERVO 03.2009
BUILD REP RT
An Introduction to Wedges
● by Thomas Kenney
Since the inception of robotic
combat, the wedge has been
viewed as one of the most
successful and easy to build
designs, though it has also
become among the most hated.
The combination of reliability and
simplicity has yet to be bested by
any other combat robot design.
Since the original wedge was
introduced by US Robot Wars
champion “La Machine” almost
14 years ago, many different
designs of wedges have developed, all of which have their own
unique quirks and advantages. In
addition to their common use as
a robot’s main weapon, they are
also often used as a backup
weapon in case the primary
weapon fails because of how
easy it is to implement a simple
wedge into a robot’s design.
Overall, the wedge can be
divided into two basic categories:
wedges that drag along the
arena floor and those that don’t.
The most obvious advantage the
dragging wedge brings to the
table is that if the arena floor is
smooth enough, it should have
no problem getting under other
robots and non-dragging wedges.
Non-dragging wedges — though
obviously not as low as dragging
ones — are usually more durable
and with adequate ground
clearance, should never become
caught up on the floor like
dragging wedges sometimes do.
Besides these two categories, one
other important design variable is
the number of wheels that the
robot uses to drive. Two-wheeled
wedges, for instance, are usually
designed completely different
than robots with four or more
FIGURE 1. Antweight “Inkspot”, an
example of a two-wheeled dragging
wedge. Photo courtesy of Steve Judd.
