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
Kinetic Combat Art:
Building for Beauty
● by Aaron Nielsen
30 SERVO 05.2017
I do declare – would you mind
waitin’ outside until I have my
galvanized skirt on?
You see 3/4 chair leg tips. I see rubber wheels at
a cost of fifty cents each. They just need a little
trimming down on the bench grinder.
With one ounce to spare, the world is my very
small oyster.