Servo - October 2011

EVENT REPORT: Clash of the B ts 2

● by Pete Smith

The Schiele Museum ( www.schielemuseum.org) in Gastonia, NC held their second “Clash of the Bots” open day on Saturday, July 23rd. Carolina Combat ( www.carolina combat.com) organized a Bot Hockey and Insect Class combat event as the main attraction.

The combat event had two Fairy weights, four Ants, and five Beetles entered, and three teams competed in Bot Hockey.

The venue is almost perfect. There was enough space for both the Bot Hockey and combat arenas, plus the pits in the main room. There was a separate space for charging LiPos and a rec room where the museum provided snacks, drinks, and lunch for the competitors.

The combat fights were round robin and there were some great matches including Weta versus Misdirected Aggression, and perhaps the best fight of all, Misdirected Aggression versus Grande Tambor (Figure 1). The fights drew standing room only crowds (Figure 2) and many can be seen on You Tube by searching “Clash of the Bots.” The Bot Hockey was much more competitive this year with Team Scotch Pies fielding new custom-built bots (Figure 3), last year’s winners Team Pneusance, and a new entry for this year — Team Meatheads (Figure 4) — with two custom bot hockey bots and Hobbyweight combat bot Apollyon. Team Meatheads bots proved fast and powerful in their matches (Figures 5 and 6) but lacked the battery life and spare bots of the other teams, so while they held their own for the first half of the 10

FIGURE 1. Misdirected Aggression vs Grande Tambor.

minute matches, they quickly fell behind in the last minutes as their bots expired.

Team Pneusance and Team Scotch Pies both won three matches each and the latter won the tie breaker to get first place. Bot Hockey proved to be very popular with both the competitors and the crowds, including one kid from the audience who had played for a team last year and waited patiently for