Antescher Assault Systems Ants

[voorsk]

I thought I'd better make a thread covering all (2) of my bots, as my single-bot thread became more about the unfeatured bot. I've got two at the moment: Suspicious Houmous and Sprouting Potato, which were both field tested at BotFest.



Sprouting Potato is a fairly basic 4 motor pusher. It drives about, it fails to push, it flies into the pit with the greatest of ease! It fought 3 and lost 3, mainly due to driver inability. When I had it under control, I found that despite having 4 motors, it couldn't out-push any other bots. I've got a few possible causes for this inability..

• It's 20g underweight
• It tends to drive up things, removing half the pushing power and increasing the grip of the opponent
• Grip seemed suspect

So, modifications will be a scoop rather than spikes (might make it interchangeable), smaller grippier wheels (possibly even caterpillar tracks!), and more weight. There's enough weight to add a servo, which is interesting...

Suspicious Houmous is a lifter, with a lifting spike at each side of the bot which rotate 360 degrees. I'd previously used it at AWS 55, where its lifters failed to work properly, and it had really bad handling. It fought 2 and lost 2. Seeing a pattern?

Well, after that, I changed the way the lifters work, and changed the wheel positions so that they're right at the front. It made it handle even more strangely, but it meant that if it managed a lift, it wouldn't lift it's own wheels off of the ground. So, this time it fought 3 and lost... 2! It actually won a fight!!

It worked much more like it was supposed to. The lifters could lift, although getting them into a position where they would lift was difficult. I couldn't tell how low they were, so trying to position them to get under someone usually meant i beached myself, which was incredibly embarrassing! I could use them at mid-height as quite a good pusher arrangement, and they were good for getting out of trouble (even managed a pit escape!) and self-righting. Plus being able to do backflips is pretty cool.

Improvements? It was having some ground clearance issues due to using 20mm standoffs at the last minute, so I need to put it on a diet. The main culprit is the power switch - it takes up a surprising amount of space! Retro's fuse gave me an idea - motherboard jumpers! I'll just have one of those poking out somewhere. ooh - it also had a weird issue where the lifters would rotate of their own accord. I had to keep adjusting them. That maaay have been a TX issue, as the centering of the throttle (which is sprung like the right stick) sometimes drifts. I think it might not have a deadzone set up, so that's easy to fix.

I have other ideas, of course. Including three new robots; a lifter based on Lucky from Battlebots, a horizontal pincer, and my continuing mission to build a melon-shaped robot (it'll most likely be armed with an axe). Fun!