Dumb Robot Competitions

Question

A while back, my friends over at Milwaukee makerspace held a Dumb Robot Competition which was inspired by a competition at Pumping Station: One in Chicago, which was inspired by HEBOCON in Japan, featured at Maker Faire Hong Kong. It got me thinking how fun it would be to have non-robot builders making battling robots.

Given a $50 spending limit and only allowed to incorporate used toys, electronics, and anything you could pick up at the local thrift store, how would you build your robot?

What parts would you incorporate?

How would you make it move?

Would your bot have a secret weapon?

Let us know in the comments below. Who knows what might happen?

Former Member · Answer

I am probably way too late to provide answers to this question seeing it was months ago, but in my defense, I just signed up here. 50$ is fine. Specify that the exteriors of all robot warriors must be cardboard and or Styrofoam exteriors. That provides the ability for safe chunks to be removed/crunched by other bots in competition. It makes it much more fun to see damage. It is obvious that you will need to secure an RC car for both remote controlling the machines and possible motor salvage. It is always best to seek out RC vehicles that use DC motors for spinning the wheels to provide the steering as opposed to a separate front servo/solenoid turn device. Examples include "Thunder Tumblers" type cars which are available right off the shelf for about 14$ each brand new(CVS and etc type stores). These make use of two wheel drive/steering, a simple RC transmitter and receiver that either uses 27 or 49 mhtz. These can easily be retuned to add extra frequencies if desired with a simple plastic hex tool(or a small plastic screwdriver). The motors are geared a bit, they have durable tires and are powered by 4 AA batteries(can be upgraded). The motors can be mounted on a simple frame and the extra "wheelie" tire on back can serve as a castor(skid steering). You could also use the front wheels for this purpose. These show up here and there in thrift stores and are usually broken from little play for 2$. They are really cheaply made bodies and chassis, but good for fodder. These use a full wave bridge circuit for the motor drive for direction control. Other small cheap RC cars also follow this type design and have similar attributes.For a weapon you can make a wedge shaped body, add protruding rods, spikes etc or get a second car and use the motors to spin something up.Since all this gear is low torque and fairly low speed you won't have serious danger involved for kids to play. I would probably 3D print a small chassis for the thing because I am printer guy, but you could even go very low tech and use wood etc. Even buying 2 of the cars, you stay under 50$(if you shop careful, they are expensive on ebay(I do not know why! shipping costs perhaps mostly). Lots of fun, easy to see some damage and throw whatever get destroyed away afterwards......But keep the RC part. Lower tech options can be had from wired remotes and battery packs using vibrating motion from motors obtained from cassette players and small toys but they don't have great direction control and don't provide a very exciting fight. Wired robot contests are fraught with issues as wires get broken/tangled are just pretty boring, but if the spirit of the contest demands recycled parts then there is the option.You can use junk remote as a battery pack-gut them and just attach wires and switches to run the motors. Have fun.... I could provide some photos and ideas, but do not see a provision here for it. And this thread is probably dead now anyway. Update: Here is a set of legs I made from the thunder tumbler toy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFx5kGWMy-s Added some acrylic parts cut from sheet to make this and used the front tires from the car and motors from the rear.This is a lot simpler than it looks to make really.Fun for soccer robot or adding a body on top for combat.A few microswitches sense the legs for the RC to turn on and off. There are no microcontrollers etc involved, basically just parts from the car. These legs eventually turned into my classic bipedal walker design. This is an older video-I mostly 3D print stuff like this nowadays....All still under the 50$ limit!

Dumb Robot Competitions

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