Servo - January 2014

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia ( www2.fi.edu) hosted its 7th annual robotic combat event on September 21,

2013. The Institute provides the venue arena and N.E.R.C. ( www.nerc.us) organizes the event.

I usually bring a couple of my bots to compete, but this year I decided to take a break from competing and offered to judge instead. Competing with even one bot ties up a lot of your time at an event and as I usually bring two or three, I sometimes find I miss much of the action while I'm repairing and recharging my bots in time for their next fights. I was to find judging keeps you just as busy, but at least you don't miss any fights!

There were 26 bots this year, fighting in five weight classes: 1 lb Antweight, 3 lb Beetleweight, 12 lb Hobbyweight, 30 lb Featherweight, and 30 lb Sportsman.

The arena is provided by the Institute, and it's a thing of beauty. It’s built up of extruded aluminum sections securing the Lexan walls and roof, and has a replaceable wood floor. The bump strips were upgraded over last year, but I wasn’t sure they would stand up to the fiercest 30 lber at full cry.

The arena and the scrolling display that I described in the February and March 2013 issues can be seen in Figure 1. (It’s bright!) I set it up to show a link to the N.E.R.C. website and display the names of the various sponsors.

Fighting got started by about 11: 30 am after the usual last minute builds in the pits and the safety tests. I was kept busy setting up my Kitbots banners and display, and setting up Team Green Machine’s Beetleweight Maniac Kathy (Figure 2) with a new transmitter. Theirs had failed a couple days before the event.

I managed to mess up the first attempt when I forgot to set the throttle at zero for binding. The bot then failed safety because the RX thought that the none-zero setting was the fail safe position. I re-binded (rebound?) the Rx with the throttle set at zero. All was well and the bot got through safety in time.

There were seven Antweights competing, but it quickly came down to four main combatants: Hanger 11, a lightly armored bot with a servo operated flipper arm (Figure 3); old time favorite and previous champion Poco Tambor (Figure 4) with its highly effective drum; newcomer Dust Pandemonium (Figure 5), which combined the classic dustpan shape in carbon fiber with a small high speed (Figure 6).

Dust Pandemonium out-drove Hanger 11 to get to the semi-finals, but then faced what looked like a quick death at the hands of Gyroscopic. However, a lucky hit with its small blade cut the o-ring belt that drove the big beater bar, and Gyroscopic tapped out soon after.

The Antweight finals were between Poco Tambor who was undefeated through the winner’s brackets, and Dust Pandemonium who had come up through the loser’s brackets. Poco Tambor seemed to lose drive early on, and his opponent took advantage to control the fight and win by a clear judge’s decision. Since Poco Tambor had only lost once so far, they had to fight again to decide who was the champion. In the second final, Poco quickly knocked out the drive on one side of its opponent but an out-of-balance drum resulted in traction problems. The fight went to the judges with Poco Tambor getting the decision. Eleven Beetleweights took part,