Update

Today was a bit of a motivation fail, seeing as I didn't wake till midday and didn't get showered/dressed until half two. Then when I took my batteries out to the shed to plug back into the lighting, I accidentally shorted the wires and the lights went out. Thought I'd blown all the LEDs but traced it to a dodgy connection and eventually managed to get the lights back on.

Anyway, as a result not much actual physical building took place today but I've settled on the designs and did a quick couple of parts mock-ups. First up is just a basic lifter/flipper design:



Drive is a couple of 1000rpm gearmotors from 'VirtualVillage' on eBay onto 48mm Banebots wheels. The weapon is a servo-powered lifter/flipper (servo has 20kg/cm of torque) connected directly to the servo horn, and I'll make a pivot point on the other side of the servo to support the arm. Power is from a 6V, 1800mAh Ni-cad pack powering both motors and receiver. And drive control is from a couple of boat winch ESCs from eBay. Apparently they don't actually offer much speed control beyond fully-on and fully-off but since I'm trying to use stuff I already have, they will do. Nice and compact too. No idea what to call it yet.

The second robot is what I consider to be a very generic US robot design, but one which remains very destructive with the right components and implementation; the horizontal bar spinner:



Tentatively calling this one Spin Cycle. The blade is 3mm steel but won't be that long, I'll cut it down when I know how much space I have to work with. I'll just be leaving it as a single bar for now but if there's spare weight, I'll add some 5mm steel cuts top and bottom (13mm thick in total) at the ends of the bar to increase inertia and possible damage. Same drive motors as above but with bigger 60mm wheels (from Paws). The controller is a Scorpion XL, brushless motor is an 1100kV E-Power something-or-other from GiantCod (seems the business and gets great reviews) geared down roughly 2:1, and brushless ESC is a 40A Black Mantis model. All powered by an 11.1V lipo pack.

I'm actually expecting the spinner mechanism to be one of the easier parts of both builds as mounting the brushless, fitting bearings and bolting in a shaft should all be pretty straight-forward (famous last words!).
Hope to have most of the construction done tomorrow as I'll be getting up much earlier ( ) so will try for some vids/spin-ups on Monday.