Servo - August 2008

Humdinger versus Pox. Guess which of these bots is having a bad day?

SUMO and Edge of Madness pause to ponder one another.

class spread starting with the cute ‘n cuddly ant weights (one pound) and ending with the “that just might rip your leg off” featherweights ( 30 pounds). As for fight structure, the 15 pound student Battle Bots IQ (BBIQ) class fought in classic bracket style, while the remaining classes fought round robin.

Taking center stage was the BBIQ half of the tournament where teams of students — some coming from as far as Williams, AZ — displayed their prowess in mathematics, science, and engineering by vigorously applying it to their opponents in the form of stored kinetic energy. When comparing the tournament designations of “student” versus “professional,” one might be tempted to assume that the “student” class was somehow inferior. That would be the thought of someone about to be resoundingly beaten by something conceived of, designed,

and built by a 10th grader.

Even the schools that opted to stick to the “classic” concepts of robot combat (wedges and bricks) managed to bring something new to the table. Billet — a simple brick bot to the untrained eye — featured magnets to increase its tractive effort. Another bot — dubbed Catapult — boasted the most James Bond worthy weapon. What I mean is they opted to forgo powering their flipper with a mere tank of air and instead chose to mount a complete working air compressor right on the robot so they could recharge on the go. Frankly, I still have no idea how that whole apparatus worked, but it did. Either way, enough about the event. Let’s talk about results.

The ant weight battles were less of a tournament and more of a one-on-one brawl for supremacy between ANTI (vertical spinner) and the peculiarly named Under WHERE (horizontal spinner). It was a friendly

rivalry, and there were only two of them; thus, they opted to pummel each other on an exhibition basis.

Moving on to the beetle weights (three pounds), third place went to Rampage Productions’ wedge bot, Screw U, which might now hold the title of “bot name that gets the most snickers when announced over the PA.” Second place went to Team Bobbing for French Fries’ wooden wonder, Boxy Brown, a wooden box with a dowel on the front and a driver with an affinity for trash picking. After Boxy took a bit of a beating from the first place finisher, his driver disappeared for a bit and, upon his return, proudly declared he had found a plastic bottle in the trash and commenced attaching it to the remains of his bot’s keep-away-stick. First place went to team Python and their bot, Strychnine, which can be best described as three pounds of precision machined, bar spinning death.