Servo - May 2015

to never-before reached speeds, causing the rear end to lift off the ground. It swung around 90 degrees, dropped to the ground, and rolled. The driver was not injured but the sail was pretty much totaled, and I never rebuilt it."

"My first combat robot was conceived in 1966 while doing electronic assembly work at a summer job. A co-worker and I discussed building R/C robots to fight each other. We tried to out-do each other, dreaming up weapons while we soldered parts in burglar alarms. It became apparent weapon-limiting rules were going to be needed when he decided an acid sprayer would be a good idea. Sadly, we did not have enough mechanical skill to make anything that didn't suck. I was the only one of us that actually built one. It was terrible and had no weapon, but basically moved and steered. No robot fights actually happened.

Many years pass ...

I joined the Atlanta Hobby Robot Club in 1999, and learned to make line followers, robot vacuums, and mini Sumo bots for their contests. This is when I started to become more interested in building mechanical things. I went to DragonCon Robot Battles in 2001 to see what it was about, and was inspired to build a bot the following year."

A visit to Heatherington's website at www.wa4dsy.net/robot is to indulge in combat robot builder porn. Everything is there — beautifully documented and photographed. T_Zero (A 12 lb/two wheeled pneumatic flipper. First combat bot. Let that one sink in for a sec. Pneumatics for your icebreaker.) is there with all the rest. There are vacuums, line followers, balance bots, and melty brains.

DH: Process? Work flow? LOL! I'm pretty disorganized and have no formal training or work experience in building mechanical stuff. It usually goes something like this: Weird idea pops into my head for no reason. Will this be effective? Will it be cool?

new skills building it?

If yes, then I try to test the concept on a small scale with a model and/or do experiments. If it still seems like a good idea, then I start with the weapon and then design a bot to carry it. Currently, I use ViaCAD on a MAC. It's cheap and is not too difficult to use. Paper and cardboard also come into play for models.

Sometimes wood. I'd rather screw up a cheap piece of cardboard or wood than 2024 aluminum. Also, I Most ideas never get to the build stage, but when they do flaws are discovered and many changes are made. When finished, it's always overweight and needs to diet. Drill holes, use lighter materials, weigh, repeat.

I try to work out the math as much as I can. I'm not good at math, but thanks to Google I can usually find the formulas I need on the Internet. To make repetitive calculations less tedious, I sometimes write special calculators in Perl or Javascript. If they prove useful, I put them on my website."