Featured This Month:
Features
24 BUILD REPORT:
Your Robot Assignment
is Due
by Jamison Go
26 MANUFACTURING:
RioBotz Combat Tutorial
Summarized — Materials
Original Text by Professor Marco
Antonio Meggiolaro; Summarized by
Kevin M. Berry
31 PARTS IS PARTS:
Wheels for Drills
by Peter Smith
Events
30 June/July 2009 Completed
and Sep/Oct 2009 Upcoming
Events
30 EVENT REPORT:
Bay Area Robot Fights at
MetroCon in Tampa
by Morgan Berry
ROBOT PROFILE – Top
Ranked Robot This Month:
33 The Big B by Kevin Berry
24 SERVO 09.2009
BUILD REP RT
Your Robot Assignment is Due
● by Jamison Go
You never really think of robot building and school work as
similar, but you may be surprised.
Consider this: Homework is given
and the due date is established; a
competition task is given and the
competition date is listed. You
the builder are like the student;
wanting to do well but a victim
to the evils of circumstance. For
example, my dog ate my homework, or, the robot broke itself.
This is the situation I sat in on
June 18th, just two days before
the Bay Area Robot Fights
competition: registered, but no
robot. However, I was able to survive thanks to some basic robot
building principles and ingenuity
when building under pressure.
The Bay Area Robot Fights is
a robotic combat event that
features the Antweight (one
pound) and Beetleweight (three
pounds) weight classes. Just like
in a boxing match, you have one
The original entry named Late Night
Leftovers spins his nearly one-pound
titanium tipped timing pulley blade at
10,000 rpms and rips into opponents
while tossing them into the air.
arena, two robots, and three
minutes. Of course, there are a
few rules (no acid weapons, no
electric shocks or EMPs, no
projectile weapons, and a few
other details) but there are still
plenty of ways to smash your
opponent. Many robots feature
fierce whirling blades to chop
their opponents or give them a
metallic uppercut punch.
My original creation was
designed with that idea exactly:
a two-wheeled triangular shaped
robot with a vertical spinning
blade fashioned from a large
timing pulley tipped with titanium
teeth. I whimsically named him
“Late Night Leftovers” (LNL), in
