Over the last few months we have been working on designing some ant weight combat robots. The problem is that we’ve never actually been to a combat robot tournament before so we have no idea if our designs are any good.
This weekend, Letourneau University in Longwood Texas hosted the Red Dirt Rumble so we decided to enter and see what we could learn. Chase had another project he had to work on so he wasn’t able to go. It was up to Landon and Coach to gather as much information and bring it back so Chase could make our bot designs better.
For this tournament, we wanted to keep things simple so we just took basic FingerTech kit robots. It didn’t make sense to spend a lot of time and effort perfecting a custom robot when we didn’t know what to expect. Besides, it would probably get destroyed anyway (foreshadowing ?).
The format for this event was straight double elimination. Your bot was placed randomly into a bracket and as soon as you lost twice, you were out.
The Destruction Begins
Both Landon and Coach drew wedge bots in their first battle and they won! That means that Annihilation Robotics has officially earned our first combat robot pogs which is super exiting for us.
For his second battle, Coach went up against a really good wedge bot called Potato. It didn’t start off well for us but somehow he figured out how to consistently get to the side of Potato and control the second half of the match. That earned him a unanimous judge’s decision and put his bot in the semifinal.
Landon wasn’t quite so lucky in his second match. His win earned him his first opportunity to go up against a vertical spinner (Stupid Simple).
Even though Landon did an incredible job of driving, this was a match where we learned a lot about the engineering challenge involved in combat robotics. The armor on his bot wasn’t strong enough to withstand the hits that Stupid Simple could deliver.
That meant that every time he made the tiniest mistake, he paid a price. You could literally hear the pieces of our bot hitting the walls of the BattleBox… which was a lot fun until we remembered it was our bot being destroyed.
Despite all of that, Landon drove brilliantly. He somehow figured out how to get to the side of Stupid Simple and dish out some hits of his own.
It ended up being a very close fight that we lost by a split decision – which was definitely the correct outcome. With that said, Stupid Simple’s weapon was hanging on by a thread at the end. We think if Landon had been able to knock it all the way off that might have swung the decision in our favor.
Either way, it was an extremely positive experience and we had a lot of fun competing with Stupid Simple.
Robot Community to the Rescue
As soon as that was over, we had to rush back to the pits to try and put Landon’s bot back together. His reward for surviving all that punishment from a horizontal spinner was… dropping down to the loser’s bracket to take on a vertical spinner called BroBot.
With some help from the other teams we were able to get the bot almost back to 100% before our fight with BroBot. Another team (Eagle) even offered to lend us some extra armor pieces to beef up the front end of both our bots.
That is what is so great about the robotics community. We had so many teams help us and offer to lend us parts at this tournament – they helped us learn so much. Please don’t ever change robotics community.
We can’t wait to get better in combat robotics, so we can start to pay all of this forward.
Having the new armor was a game changer in this battle. It meant that Landon could drive a little more aggressively without taking on catastrophic damage. He used that ability to bend one of the front forks on BroBot early in the fight. That made the vertical spinner much less effective and gave Landon an opening to get around to the side of BroBot and control the match.
The good news is that we did win this one. The bad news is that we sustained a lot of damage in the process. Landon’s bot was being held together by duct tape in a lot of spots and we weren’t able to get it to drive quite right before the last match.
He ended up losing his last battle to a wedge bot called Eagle (the one who lent us their armor). With that Landon was out of the tournament. But he did a whole lot better than we expected and proved that he is going to be an incredible driver in the future.
Coach Hits the Ceiling… Literally
Next up was Coach’s battle against Goose Em in the semifinal. Coach came out flying in this match, dominating the first 30 seconds. Unfortunately, Goose ‘Em is a much more nimble, durable bot than ours and – let’s be real – Ryan from Goose ‘Em is a way better driver than coach will ever be.
It didn’t take long before Goose ‘Em was able to get around to our side. He pretty much had his way with us for the last 2 1/2 minutes of the fight.
Waiting for us in the loser’s bracket was Abaddon – a wildly destructive egg beater bot. You can probably guess what happened next.
Once again, Coach came out aggressively and dominated the first 30 seconds. Then Abaddon got a couple shots in and ended the fight… but not before bouncing our robot off the roof of the battlebox a couple times. Lol
That’s where our day ended.
We left feeling great about our experience at this event. We went 4-4 overall and we came away with some great ideas for how to make our custom robots better.
Chase is already working on some sweet designs for us. We are feeling confident that we can be competitive at our next tournament.
Let’s go!!
