Bugglebots 2019:

After a quick stop-off in Cambridge, I arrived in Bristol a day before the competition, and got to see the new and improved pit-space for the first time. I got myself unpacked, got friendly with my pit buddies (Felix Townsend of Rev 4 in my case), and spent the next few hours frantically trying to remove weight off my bot. I had an awful lot of help from other builders, especially Felix who grinded my Titanium blades and melted together my PU belts, bought a spare battery from Rory Charlesworth, and did a ton of cutting and countersinking of both plastic and titanium to get a finished bot together. I was staying in what I’m just gonna call the ‘Drizzle’ house (Tom, Sarah, Tim, Catherine, Charlie, and Aaron), but I actually didn’t end up leaving with them that night just so I could get the bot checked and ready to go. After a final desperate session of swiss-cheesing, the robot had *finally* made it into the legal weight limit with not a gram to spare. Phew!


Talk about cutting it close!

We all arrived the following morning, got ourselves ready to compete, and heard all of the draws for each heat. Ours was an interesting one with a variety of weapon designs, and while I didn’t ever believe that I could win the heat, I remained hopeful that I could at least show some improvement from my last competition.

Fight 1 VS. Unconscious 514:

My first fight was against what may have been the most unconventional design in the competition. Unconscious 514 (Shirumi Eku) was a crusher bot coming all the way from China, two things that have never been seen in the European circuit. I was fortunate that this was my first opponent, as it allowed me to show off my new spring flipper design. I knew that Unconscious had a weapon that could go through my 2mm HDPE top armour like it was nothing, but my one advantage was that it was slow to self-right, so if I could get around him, I could have enough power to flip him over, then start to control the fight while he was upside down.


Fight starts at 11:02

The fight started with me getting accustomed to how Léim Thart drove in this new arena, as well as noting how Unconscious was struggling to get past the lips on the floor. I knew I couldn’t take Unconscious head-on due to him winning the ground game and the lethal potential of the weapon, so much of the fight was me just trying not to overcommit to one attack, but also to try and get behind Unconscious, which was a challenge indeed thanks to Shirumi’s excellent driving. You can actually see the flipper fire once around the 40 second mark of the fight, but the blade was just too far away.

Things were going quite well, and I managed to control the bot better and get behind him more often as the fight went on, but unfortunately one unlucky shove left me stuck in the jaws of Unconscious, with little chance of escape. I actually tried firing the flipper here, but the gears inside the lifter gearbox had exploded like usual, and I was left with no more options. Interestingly enough, the exact same thing had happened to Unconscious, but he still managed to get the KO via pitting.

The good:


  • The drive is fast, grippy, and controllable. Heads and shoulders an improvement over last year!
  • The flipper fired in a fight, and rewound itself without breaking.
  • My battery was barely missed, so no irreparable lipo fire.


The bad:


  • The weapon never landed a hit, and so I never got to show off the months of hard work that went into the weapon.
  • The gearbox shredded some gears again, resulting in another disassembly and rebuild.



The mark left in the top armour by Unconscious 514.

Fight 2 VS. Rev 4, W I D 3 B O I:

This match put me in the heat’s redemption melee against two people who had actually helped get Léim Thart to a finished state, and both called for very different strategies to beat. The titanium wedge to take Rev 4’s (Felix Townsend) monstrous hits was an obvious move, so I dismantled the spring setup and replaced it with the experimental four-bar lifter. WIDEBOI (Alex Shakespeare, also I’m not doing the full name again) meanwhile was an excellent controlbot, and I was uncertain I could get around him, so I needed a strategy for head-on collisions. I had brought along a longer titanium arm with a bot to act as a keepaway stick, with the intention of countering forked machines such as Thunder Child, and with a bit of measuring by eye, I positioned the bolt in such a way where I could catch WIDEBOI between its toes and lift it up, shifting all the weight to my end and giving me an edge in any resulting pushing match. Speaking of weight, even with the four-bar I was still over the weight limit, so I actually had to scrap some of my top armour to even make it into the arena!


The re-modified robot ready to go into the arena.


Fight starts at 27:05

The match started cagey enough, with my priority being to keep my wedge pointed at Rev 4 for defense, though once it KO’ed itself after deflecting off the wedge I could focus on WIDEBOI head on. This was a fun matchup; the waggle-sticks on WIDEBOI could easily hook onto the top of Léim Thart, but the keepaway stick and lifter combo allowed me to push WIDEBOI around quite a bit, and when all four wheels were on the ground Léim Thart had a massive amount of speed and pushing power. After a lucky slam near the pit, I managed to go around it while WIDEBOI found itself falling in. Léim Thart had managed its goal of getting further in the competition than the previous machine, and with next to no damage I could finally take it a bit easier in preparing for the next fight!

Fight 3 VS. The Apprentice:

This match saw me against The Apprentice (Mark Smith), an overhead spinner that had a lot of energy and that, unfortunately for me, had a weapon that would hit over the titanium wedge at the back. I modified the keepaway stick in such a way where I hoped I could lift a still-spinning robot so that it would destabilise itself and give me a KO victory.


Fight starts at 40:31

Starting out the fight, I noticed that The Apprentice took quite an amount of time to get up to speed, so my main priority was to stop the weapon as often as I could and to stop it from doing any significant damage to me. The HDPE armour actually stood up very well to the blows from The Apprentice that landed, and though the keepaway stick didn’t really get a chance to work properly, I was able to get some aggressive slams into my opponent. Near the end of the fight, The Apprentice seemed to be losing either grip or drive, and I was able to get a very unlikely KO on a bot that I was quite afraid of, and somehow managed to make it all the way to the heat final!


Fully repaired and ready to go into the heat final!