Top Tests

What Are your "tests" to check your robot is ready to take a beating ?

Do you drop It ? Ram it into a wall ? How do you test in the absence of another Robot ?

Research can be key, if you know a robot with similar armour have a look at it and see where its bending ect.

Otherwise, any destructive test you do is likely to be either insufficient or.... destructive.

The only exception being internal testing, ie driving your robot against a brick wall for a fight length to test the components under load. Or testing any weapon against objects bigger/more solid than what their likely to come up against (the standard beetle test is my old Ti featherweight chassis).

Does the weapon function? Does it drive? Would I be happy to drop it 6ft and it land on any part?

Trying to over work the motors etc is a great idea ... Whats the average fight length off the back of that reply Gareth ?

Gary is 6ft off the top of your head or is there a reason behind that height ?

No real reason. Heavyweights and feathers typically seem to fly up towards head height give or take during battles if they get flipped. There are of course more extreme events but it's a good basis.

The best test of course is full combat, things come to light you don't expect. I like Gary's test, drop it 6ft on to a corner if it bends or breaks, re - engineer. You won't do that of course, because we never do í ½í¸Š

The rule of thumb I use when building for live events is "Would I be happy to hit this anywhere as hard as I can with a pic-axe?". If there's any part of the bot where the idea of hitting it really hard makes me wince, then it's not ready for combat :p A full sized pic-axe is also a good test for choosing armour materials from scraps; I used one to find that 20mm plywood and old 10mm polycarb are no good, but it won't pierce 2mm stainless (bends massively though).

Also, there's the classic drive train test of seeing if it can happily spin the wheels against a wall with someone stood on top; plenty of times you'll have the weight of another robot sat on top, so it's a good test of whether your drive train is up to the job.

I dropped Tough As Nails from the highest reach of the forklift (4,75 meter) on a concrete floor.
And had Beta wack at the Oundle Mill in Peterborough.
It survived both tests, with some cosmetic damage.

It still is running after 13 years...

When I first started building robots, the best advice I got was that the more successful teams have stuck with an idea and evolved it. I'm not a great builder, but my current two wheel drive pusher is about the 7th incarnation and quite easily stands up to most beetle spinners. Once you've competed for a while and seen a few events, you get a tangible feel somehow for the energy certain weapons carry in different weight classes. You can keep rebuilding and putting the robot in with nasty stuff till it comes out unscathed. At that point you'll find you start to get further in the competitions your attending n stuff.