We had so much fun at Robot Rebellion this weekend! If you are thinking about giving combat robotics a try, you should just go ahead and do it. It’s a blast!
This tournament was held at the Rev Robotics warehouse in Carrolton, TX and it goes without saying at this point that the people from Texas Robot Combat did an incredible job of organizing it.
We took two bots to compete in the Plastic Ant division. Those bots didn’t work AT ALL, so we aren’t going to talk about that. Back to the drawing board!! lol
Fortunately, we also took two full combat Antweight division – Catnip and Spartan. Those two bots are twins and throughout the day people were joking that they couldn’t tell them apart. But even though they use the same chassis, the internal electronics are different.
Seeing Catnip and Spartan performed in the box gave us some very interesting feedback on the benefits of higher torque vs higher RPMs. We’re going to have to spend some time figuring out what it all means for future bots.
We had a rough start to the day in our qualifying matches (the tournament was a Swiss format where each bot got three matches and the top robots them moved on to a single elimination bracket).
Catnip was initially paired against a vertical spinner called Scrapper S-1. Against our better judgment we went with a wedge configuration instead of our forks. That was clearly the wrong choice and we lost a judge’s decision.
Spartan’s first match was against a Nautiloid style bot called Ethos. It was a close match but we still hadn’t quite figured out how to drive Spartan effectively yet. Ethos was able to land a few solid hits on us and earned a judge’s decision.
After that, we got some more favorable match ups and both bots were able to make it to the elimination bracket with 2-1 records.
All week, Chase had been saying that he finally had a horizontal configuration so he was hoping he would get to fight a horizontal spinner this weekend. Well… ask and you shall receive! From that point on, every bot we faced was a horizontal spinner.
Catnip got it started with a battle against a scalar kit called Feathertron 9000. This match had a ton of hard hits – our bot really proved its durability. We felt like we were able to control most of the fight and move Feathertron around the box the way we wanted.
Towards the end of the match, he was able to land a couple of hits that took off three of our wheels (yes THREE). Even that wasn’t enough to kill Catnip and he was still mobile when it was sent to a judge’s decision. We did control most of the match, but the damage was too much for us to overcome and judge’s voted to send Feathertron to the next round. That was the end of Catnip’s day.
We were already pretty happy with our day at this point, and looking ahead at the gauntlet of horizontal spinners waiting for Spartan in the bracket we didn’t expect much more. But we underestimated Chase’s new horizontal configuration- it was very effective.
Spartan was able to use his wedge to send the first two horizontals we faced into the pit. Our reward was a spot in the semifinal against a bot called Slaughter to Prevail – possibly the scariest looking 1 lb bot we’ve ever seen.
This was another match where we controlled the action and were able to push Slaughter around more or less as we wanted. But he was able to land a couple of good hits towards the end which gave him a very close judge’s decision.
Not to worry though! Our day wasn’t over yet. We still had the 3rd place battle ahead of us… which was hard to believe given that 27 bots entered this tournament and we started off with a loss. But here we were!
The pit was our friend again in this match as we were able to pit out a very well designed horizontal spinner named Red Velvet! Somehow we managed to get 3rd Place at this tournament! It’s safe to say that we’re getting the hang of this combat robotics thing.
We’re definitely going to need some time to process all that we learned this weekend.
