No, he means they'd struggle against the Brazilian and US lightweights, and I can easily believe that. Even if two UK feathers went as a cluster, they'd still be taking on a bot twice their individual weight.
I think he was referring to my suggestion of using two feathers as a lightweight clusterbot at Robogames. There are some very powerful lightweight [60 lb] spinners. Still ... it would be interesting to see.
Not putting any of the UK bots down; they would be up against very powerful spinners weighing TWICE as much as the smallest class is lightweight and your bots would have to compete as cluster bots. Also the US arena really doesn't favour flippers. On the other hand, there are not many good featherweights left in the US as there are so few events for them - Motorama is possibly the only regular featherweight event left.
Ahhh, that makes more sense!Originally Posted by overkill
It is a bit worrying that the US is dropping feathers, its preventing most of the UK from going over and competing/supporting their events and visa-versa. Europe and AUS seem to be the only ones running them in earnest.
I am not sure why they are happy to run machines that are double the weight or half the weight but not 30lbs! Why has it been abandoned as a class?
There are several reasons that I heard over the years: For RoboGames, Dave decided that A) small bots in a huge arena were not exciting enough (the insect weight bots have their own small arena), B) there were scheduling problems and C) he didn't have the extra staff or funds to run that many classes in the main arena. I don't agree with any of that but its Dave's show.
For the other events, the main problem is a lack of a large enough arena. I don't know who owns the arena at Motorama and the other featherweight event is the USATL in Florida which uses the RoboGames arena and may not run each year. It would be great if the Motorama arena was used for other events but it doesn't seem to be happening
Yeah, that all makes sense.
Problem with us going over there is that if we can't use feathers then it would be Lightweights.. but we can't fight them over here, so it would be pretty pointless to build one. Oh well. Maybe in the future.
It is as Overkill says and a lot of it has to do with the capacity of the big arena. It is running flat out the whole time. I've discussed it with Dave and it is his view is that with a limited amount of arena capacity they should be running the biggest and most spectacular ones and as those classes have grown the others have had to make way for them.
When I first went in 2007 they still ran 12 pounders and I built one because it was easy to fit in my luggage. When those were eliminated, I took a featherweight and when those went I graduated to a lightweight. Brits thinking of entering might want to consider building a 60 lb machine just for Robogames. I've done it and thought it was worthwhile. And don't forget the 3 lb Beatle category and the 1 lb Ants. You can get a lot of them in your luggage. And there is also the autonomous 1 and 3 lb classes where radio control is used only to turn them on [and off], after that they are on their own - it is a whole different experience in robot building.
It's on! The kickstarter succeeded and the dates have been set for the first weekend in April, 3-5. It is a long way to go but worth it.
Have you seen any new info on US forums? The Robogames web site has a few updates but most info is still about the 2013 event.
Got this from the Robogames guys: RoboGames is happy to announce the 11th RoboGames - we will once again host the best international robot competition in the world - April 3-5th, 2015 in San Mateo, California. They will start taking registrations from next week.
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