Featured This Month:
Features
20 Vapor Bot Build Report
by Kevin Berry and Charles Guan
Events
22 Feb/Mar 2008 Results and
May/Jun 2008 Upcoming
Events
23 EVENT REPORT: WAR in:
Seattle by Rob Farrow
ROBOT PROFILE – Top
Ranked Robot This Month:
25 Sewer Snake by Kevin Berry
If you’d like to see more photos
of kinetic energy weapons from
the April Combat Zone article by
Mike Jeffries, go to www.servo
magazine.com/downloads.
There just wasn’t enough room
to print all of them!
20 SERVO 05.2008
BUILD REP RT
Vapor Bot Build Report
● by Kevin Berry and Charles Guan
Come on, we’ve all done it. Bot
inspiration hits, and we jump
on parts sites and toss together a
vapor bot. Sometimes it’s in our
heads, sometimes sketched on
the back of a random piece of
paper in a meeting or classroom,
and often it makes it to the
drawing stage. Honest builders
will tell you they’ve produced a
dozen vapor bots for every one
they’ve actually fielded.
My latest venture into vapor
bot land was prompted by a post
to the SouthEastern Combat
Robotics forum by a
firefighter in a small
rural department.
Their budget won’t
allow them to buy a
$30,000 off-the-shelf
public safety
machine, so they
are hoping to
build something
themselves. Well,
combat builders are
the kings of build-it-yourself, so a
collaborative vapor bot project
quickly ensued.
We came to understand
the basic requirement was for
something that could crawl out
to an accident site, carrying some
stand-alone monitors and a
camera (items they already have),
possibly shoving debris like a car
door out of the way or climbing
over it. It might also carry spare
breathing bottles or beefy tools
for rescue personnel into the
danger zone, so fewer people are
exposed to potential hazards. A
Bot Dimensions.
