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I have been pondering over the idea of a jumping robot. I was wondering if you all think it would fall into the same category as a walker and hence qualify for the 200kg weight limit?
Weaponry for something that jumps is tricky without resorting to spinning (and Ive had enough of that!), but the extra weight might permit something decent.
Any ideas?
Si
could the arena take repeated jumps from a 200kg monster?
Actually, Ive been wondering about aiming at 200kg and sticking one big ram on the bottom (see some of MITs work in dynamic balance in the 1980s). Since the CO2 weight doesnt count, you end up significantly over 200kg (youd need quite a lot of cylinders in it). Armour it a lot, stick some spikes on the bottom, and drop on people. Allowing for some elasticity so you dont need to re-fill the ram on each bounce, I reckon it might be possible to keep it going for the full time (but Im not basing that on very much).
Shouldnt be that difficult, and if you can jump to 2m or so youre doing 14mph at the time you hit - equivalent to some rammers. You just have to take a bit of care that no-one knocks your leg off, and that you can get up in the air quickly when youre grounded.
It might well damage the arena (especially with downward pointing spikes) if you missed (the foot should be okay), and - more importantly - leap over the edge, though. You dont want 300kg hitting the outer wall at speed. Plus you need some way to enter the arena without crowning yourself on the entry door.
Id be interested to see it done; I have more interesting designs which Id rather try first.
My tuppence worth.
--
Fluppet
In the 1990s I built an electrically powered jumping ram - worked fairly well, but was compromised by my poor facilities and lack of machining ability.
Now I have both to a greater or lesser degree - I wondered about another go and if it could be used for RWs.
The original could jump a couple of feet in the air and was steered by moving the ram on a pair of gimbals. Fine movement was achieved by vibrating the ram and it moved in very small hops.
The key to it all is energy recovery which is near impossible with CO2. I never made it work at the time - but I can now! I reckon on about 20-50% recovery per jump, which gives you a fairly soft landing and of course extends the life.
Thought it would be interesting, but couldnt think of a suitable weapon - until now - an electric, kinetic axe / hammer powered by a flywheel. I think Ive solved most of the problems I can forsee. The big advantage of a flywheel powered axe is that you absorb the reaction torque to spinning up the flywheel slowly, then with the flywheel disconnected mechanically from the rest of the robot, dump the energy into the axe. The robot will still receive a reaction as the combination of axe and flywheel will try to rotate about their centre of mass. This would initially push the robot down, then backwards, then make it jump a little. If one were to time the little jump with a big jump from the ram - it might be able to jump pretty high!
Si
The Team that built Pain ...R.Wars series 2 ... had a plan for a Pogobot called
8 Ball .....sadly their site seems to have fallen into disrepair :sad:.
Quote from Googles cache of what is left of this page ......
8 Ball is going to be a little different - its a PogoBot...
Well, we were intending building one new robot to replace the but events sort of overtook us when we came up with the idea of making a leaping robot (PogoBot). Design is quite simple, so this shouldnt take forever to build...making it controlable, on the other hand, that will need some thought