Servo - April 2014

12 SERVO 04.2014

This month, we continue the revival of our 60 lb combat robot, Troublemaker. Last time, NiCad packs to lighter, higher energy density LiPoly packs. While a battery upgrade is undeniably practical, it does not galvanize the imagination as effectively as some other tweaks. This time, we wanted to turn our gray matter towards something a bit more exciting — upgrading Troublemaker’s weapon.

The endless possibilities of weapon designs are some of the most unique and irresistible parts of combat robotics. In many ways, we think it appeals to one of the most basic elements of play that we all enjoyed as kids one way or the other: wreaking havoc and destruction.

More than that, we think that the weapon is the centerpiece of the core task of a combat robot — a task far more complicated than its tendency to be summarized through onomatopoeia might suggest.

That task is to disable your opponent which can be done in myriad ways. A bot can be high centered, flipped over, sent over the edge of an arena, or have its batteries ripped from its chest like a robotic version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. While this part of the task seems to get the most attention, there is an equally important aspect that needs to be considered: doing any or all of these things to the opponent without having your own bot sustain commensurate damage. It’s all about Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and we wanted to upgrade Troublemaker’s weapon so that it would deal major damage to opponents without suffering an equal and opposite reaction of doom to itself. This calls for some serious physics.

Eye of the Brainstorm

There is always a lot to learn from history, so it is important to review the trials and travails of Troublemaker’s record as a competitive combot. When we were first designing Troublemaker (then known as Trilobot) in 2001, the first step of our design process was to determine that we wanted something