Combat Robotics
I love competing in Combat Robotics, The sport is better known as Battlebots. Below are a few of my robots. Follow along at https://www.instagram.com/teamfoodfight/ to see some behind the scene shots.
Big Dill 2021
Big Dill competed in the 20021 Season 6 of BattleBots that will air on the Discovery Channel. This was a complete ground up rebuild from the previous version. Strong emphasis was placed on creating and streamline and stylized silhouette. While retaining the robust internal features that gave us our tank like durability.
Build Process
The entire design and build of this robot happened during a shortened time frame due to the ever moving filming schedule. Because of COVID, the show had troubles landing date commitments to filming. So the build schedule had to be compressed once filming was greenlit and the competition was confirmed to be happening.
WAR Hawk 2019.
WAR Hawk 2.0 competed in the 2019 Season 4 of BattleBots that will air on the Discovery Channel. We'll post more photos and videos after our matches are televised to avoid spoilers.
Build Process.
The entire model was detailed out in Solidworks. A top-down build approach meant that small design tweaks would propagate to all parts of the model and made updating production files quick and efficient . The drive pod were designed at bolted together 6061 panels, this allowed for a good mixture of strength and serviceability as we could easily swap out damaged outer panels. The center frame was water jet from AR400 plate and welded together to form the different weapon modules of the robot. The welded construction here gave us a robust attacking front that could be quickly repaired with a grinder and welder in the pits.
Mad Catter 2019.
Mad Catter competed in the 2019 Season 4 of BattleBots that will air on the Discovery Channel. It is the second robot I designed and helped at the 2019 BattleBots tournament. We'll post more photos and videos after our matches are televised to avoid spoilers.
Build Process.
Mad Catter was designed to be a budget friendly build and thus was primarily made of laser cut AR400 plate. This allowed for a low cost frame solution that streamlined the build process. Mad Catter houses 9 brushless motors and has custom gearboxes for all the subsystems. (Hammer, Lifter, Drive.) We packed a lot of function into the robot so lots of consideration went into how to layout and optimize components inside the frame.
WAR Hawk 2018.
A 250 lb vertical disk spinner that competed in the 2018 season of BattleBots. This robot was designed to be low cost, quick to manufacture, and easy to repair . The end result was a highly competitive robot that took less than 3 weeks to build.
Build Process.
Since this was a quick turn build. The frame was waterjet from only 3 thicknesses of AR400 plate and welded together to form the different modules of the robot. By simplifying the construction we were make an easily repairable and serviceable robot.
猫王 (Mao Wang) 2018
Known in English as Cat King, Cat King is a 110kg combat robot which competed in the debut season of This is Fighting Robots. While similar in architecture to WAR Hawk 2018. Cat King was actually the test platform for WAR Hawk and was used to iron out details for that build.
Video Compilation:
Clip of Cat Kings first few matches.
Pizza Slicer
An antweight (1lb) vertical spinner. Custom built from the ground up this has been my main combat robot. Pizza Slicer won bronze at its first ever Robogames competition. Robogames is the largest combat robotics competition in the world.
Video of Pizza Slicer competing at Robogames 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrfz69lVGcQ
HotDog Roller
An antweight drum bot. Hotdog Roller is a fun bot and does extremely well in rumbles when facing multiple robots at once.
Other Robots.
A collection of other combat robots that I have made in the past.
