Servo - July 2015

Old Teams and New Teams

As mentioned, there will be six episodes of BattleBots. In order to hold a competition, film it in front of a live audience, and be ready to broadcast it this Father’s Day, ABC limited the event to just 24 robots with four alternates. These were chosen from a few dozen entries submitted by teams in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Donald Hutson of San Diego, CA leads Team Mutant Robots, and drives the bot during fights. They are sponsored by QualComm, Solid Works, Automation Direct, and CAMWorks. Donald won two past BattleBot championships with his super heavyweight robot, Diesector, and in November 2001, won the BattleBot award for Best Driver. Donald clearly represents the veteran champion. He has competed in all four BattleBot weight classes, and has even built a 900 monster called GearCrow. There will be no super heavyweights this time at BattleBots. Motors, batteries, and builders have all gotten better since 2002. To contain all the energy of a robot fight, BattleBots upped the BattleBox’s polycarbonate walls to 1.250 inches. However, even with 25% thicker walls, they decided that 250 pounds was as much robot as they could safely contain.

Because of the shortened season and limited number of bots, all robots are limited to that weight. The upshot is that for the first time on television, every robot can face every other robot in the competition.

Challenging the veterans for this year’s trophy are younger, newer teams like Team JACD. JACD is a collaboration between Cambridge-based robot builders

Adam Bercu, Charles Guan, Dane Kouttron, and Jamison Go. They are far from newbies, however, having built dozens of robots for other robot fighting competitions weighing between one and 120 pounds. They have a dozen championship trophies in their collection, as well. Even with all that experience, they discovered partway through that building a 250 pound robot is more that twice the work, so they brought in additional team members.