Servo - May 2017

While I have a master’s degree in English literature from a respected institution that very much regrets that decision, I swear by the following: Samuel Taylor Coleridge never wrote poetry with lines as beautiful as Beta: the 250 pound hammer robot built by Jon Reid, which appeared in season 2 of BattleBots™. It is a masterwork of engineering and material science, and evidence that an individual with a well-equipped shop can create almost anything.

I — by way of comparison — own a bandsaw, a cordless drill, and a degree in a field that suggests I struggle to calculate a 20% tip, but I still coveted a Beta of my own. Specifically, I wanted one 1/250th the size, or just large enough to fight in the one pound (Antweight) class.

Could it be done? I had to find out, and as a consequence, this article is going to focus on something of a peculiar method of designing and building a robot: one centered around aesthetics.

As this bot was intended to be more of a homage than a competitive death machine (though the latter was certainly in the list of desirable traits), I was immediately faced with an artistic quandary. What made Beta, Beta?

I came up with three fundamentals that (to my way of thinking) had to be incorporated into my micro-machine version of the bot. In order of importance, they were:

1. Pyramidal shape with the hammer pivot at the apex.

2. Kinked hammer with a relatively long arm.

3. One-piece metal protective skirt.

On the surface, addressing the shape problem should have been easy. However, one of the intrinsic challenges of building a hammer bot is a material science problem — the need for an extremely rigid chassis.

Most of the time (courtesy of my lack of tooling), I build using soft plastic, aluminum, and enough globs of hot glue that it can be considered structural.

This means my bots are floppy and prone to getting chewed up, but at least they don’t explode when my opponent (Joe Doom-Spinner) swoops in with some five-bazillion RPM