Team Health & Safety - First Time Builder

[Zenith]

UWE Bot Brawl 2019
24th of February 2019, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

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Prior to this event being scheduled there were already rumors going around of the next season of Bugglebots season happening somewhere in the Spring. Cosmin and I agreed that the Bot Brawl would be the ideal opportunity to get the new WeeWoo tested - this version includes weaponry, with Woo sporting a grabber, and Wee a spinner. In the months prior I'd made it my mission to build the new grabber Woo fully out of new parts, so should there be issues we could at least nip them in the bud.

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It would also be a farewell of sorts. The first version of Woo (as seen in season 1 of Bugglebots) was to experience its final outing this event, as the internals needed redoing anyway and I had plans to further improve the design. Apart from a better fork setup and a new 'spatula' setup, Woo basically ran this event straight from Bugglebots season 1.

The event itself was a big one - 48 robots attended, with the first round being a 3-way melee. To make matters worse, only one robot would go through after the first round, and the losers would then try and get back through a redemption round.

Our first round was against another new robot from Gus (OwObotics) called Sosig, and the infamous Drizzle. Sosig is modular, in that it can switch to a horizontal and a vertical spinner setup. This led to some interesting last minute alterations, where both teams went as far as to even bring their robots covered up to the arena doors. Drizzle had mounted its new raindrop blade, geared for maximum bite whilst also enabling it to selfright.

We just went with the plows and hoped for the best. We'd agreed I'd go for Drizzle as Woo's plow was better mounted than Wee's, and the results were... spectacular. Woo first took a hit from Sosig, and then tanked the first hit from Drizzle sending both bots flying. Woo was seemingly fine, so let's do that again! Drizzle clipped the back, and then hit Woo in the face again, ripping it off in a shower of sparks. Woo, amazingly, was still able to drive away.

Cosmin meanwhile was handling Sosig a bit better, as the horizontal had stopped working after the first encounter with Woo. Wee smashed into Drizzle, stopping the disc, and in a later encounter flipped both Sosig and Drizzle in 1 move. Drizzle couldn't selfright, Sosig lost its link... so under the crowd chanting WeeWoo we were ruled the winners!

It took a while for the adrenaline to sink after this, for both of us.

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But it was at a cost, though. Woo's plow was bent like a pringle, the right-hand rear axle was bent and the wheel on it was smashed, so it would take some work to get the little bugger into shape again.

Luckily though, we were the second fight of the day, and our Round of 32 wouldn't be up until after the Redemption rounds, so quite some hammering later Woo was ready to roll again... only for us to find out our next opponent was Saw Loser. Something something competitive field? We set WeeWoo up with the forks.

That fight was basically the worst case scenario for us. Woo drove abysmally because of constant interference and so we had a harder time as usual to control Alex to where we wanted. To make matters worse Saw Loser flipped Wee over in an early hit, so Wee's magnet downforce was gone. Woo tanked another hit, and the right-hand drive side was then not working properly (hey, familiar problem?). Alex then putting Wee with its magnet onto the sidewall sealed our fate. We were out of the main tournament.

Opening up Woo revealed that, much like at Bugglebots, the right-hand drive motor had loosened itself and had started eating its way through one of its wires. The motor was too hot to touch, still ran but probably had to be replaced. It convinced me that, even though Woo had proven again it was a tank, Woo had some serious design flaws that needed to be addressed.

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It also left us with another issue - we hadn't run the new WeeWoo yet. Enter the boys from Rust in Pieces - one of the other two (!) clusterbot entries this event. Signups for 2v2 whiteboards had opened and they wanted to fight with us against two other full-weight beetles. Yes please! Scott from Attitude Adjuster and Ralf from Anxt signed up with their axebots, so off we went to have a 2v2 with 6 robots in the arena. Clusterbot supremacy!

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The fight was chaos, as you would expect. I noticed Woo, even though it grabbed Anxt's axe and later drove Attitude Adjuster through the arena with it, could do with a bigger mouth, as the top jaw wasn't really able to hold on to opponents. Wee also took no prisoners, oftentimes sending itself flying because of its spinner hits. Both the axebots were eventually pitted, after which we had a clusterbot face-off. I noticed Woo needs the magnets to be a tad further down for more downforce, but other than that we were both pleased with how the new WeeWoo performed.

We hope we get to show its stuff for real in Bugglebots Season 2!