Servo - July 2012

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Featured This Month:

28 BUILD REPORT: Horses for Courses by Pete Smith

30 BUILD REPORT: Siafu: an Army of Ants — Part 2 by Pete Smith

32 EVENT REPORT: Insects Invade RoboGames by Dave Graham

37 EVENT REPORT: Robot Riot Photojournal by Andrea Suarez

38 EVENT REPORT: Robot Rumble 5 by Pete Smith

39 EVENT REPORT: RoboGames 2012 by Ray Billings

41 EVENT REPORT: South Florida Robot Riot by Dave Graham

45 The History of Robot Combat: RoboGames by Morgan Berry

47 CARTOON

BUILD REPORT:

Horses for Courses

● by Pete Smith

Combat robotics is — in many ways — a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. If everything else is equal, a brick will beat a spinner; a flipper will beat a brick; and a spinner will beat a flipper.

However, life is more complex than a game and there are many varieties of bots. To increase your chance of winning a fight, it’s a good idea to be able to modify your bot to take advantage of your opponent’s weaknesses or to neutralize its strengths.

My Beetleweight Trilobite allows for the attachment of different devices; you can design these so you can match up better with opponents. In preparation for Motorama, I developed some new attachments to counter those bots that I thought were the toughest competitors.

First, there are the wedges and flippers. These need to get under your bot to be effective. To beat them, you stop that and, in turn, get under them so you can push them around, overturn them, or slam them against the wall.