Build Your Own Combat Robot
Robot Wars

Crazy Robots in Competition
Did you know you could build your own robot from a fischertechnik robot kit and make it a battlebot? Any lay person would have been dumbfounded: crazy robots on the stage are fighting a royal battle in a robot arena, and about 200 young people, teachers, parents, and a huge number of people from the press are applauding wildly. This unusual spectacle was to be seen on 26th February in the main lecture theatre of the College of Advanced Technology and Business in Reutlingen. The Automation Technology Faculty there had invited people in to the final event in the Crazy Robots competition for school-children.

The leading actors in this show were computer-controlled robots which competed against one another to pick up ping-pong balls – and the youngsters who built them were competing as well, of course. They came from six schools in the area of Reutlingen, Pfullingen, and Rottenburg and had been working for five months with the fischertechnik "Mobile Robots" construction kit (with Intelligent Interface and Software LLWin 2.1) and such other components as plastic cups or corrugated board. The aim was to build a robot that could work autonomously. To get make their battle bots fit for competition, the participants had to do the work of a fully qualified engineer, meaning mechanical engineering design, initial hardware designs, and software development.

The results of this work was little short of genius in places: for instance, very simple robot vehicles designed along the lines of the old engineering principle: "Keep it simple". These consisted of hopper-shaped shovels at the front of the vehicle and a frame at the back for keeping hold of the collected ping-pong balls. However, most of the battlebots had a proper load surface, in order to ensure that the balls, once retrieved, would not wander away again. The balls on these load surfaces were then transported by paddle-wheels, swivelling arms, or conveyor belts. The software in the vehicle determined the way the battlebot would react if it ran up against the perimeter of its playing field or collided with another vehicle.

In the finale of the robot war, battlebot EBG3 from the Eugen Bolz school in Rottenburg fought against its colleague, FLG2 from the Friedrich List school in Reutlingen. The Eugen Bolz robot worked on the paddle-wheel principle, and won the competition. Third place went to Robot FSG2 from the Friedrich Schiller school in Pfullingen. A special award was made to Robot EBG1 from Rottenburg; the panel of judges was greatly taken by the idea of sucking the balls up in the air with the aid of a blow-dryer motor and then letting them drop into a box.

The rewards for the three winning teams were further products from the sponsor, fischertechnik, with which they could continue with their experiments. Their robot models were also displayed on the fischertechnik stand at the Didacta ’99 exhibition, and all the school-children were invited to make a conducted tour of the DaimlerChrysler works in Sindelfingen. The winner groups could, among other things, cast a glance at the co-sponsor’s research laboratory and enjoy a trip round the test track.

Build Your Own Combat Robot by Pete Miles, Tom Carroll List Price: $24.99