 The future is here. We're building robots today. Awesome. Really awesome. So we have Robert here to take us through and how it's all done. So he's from makespace in Cambridge. He's come specially from the UK to join us today. And I'm very excited to be my first combat robot. So please show me how it's done. Thank you. Please, Robert. Hello. Right. So the talks are titled Building Your First Combat Robot. But it's a bit more about designing your first combat robot. So I've been interested in robot wars and the like since about 1998 when it first came out on BBC TV. So it's back in the day. First robots. It's quite fun watching them beat the crap out of each other. Yeah. So that's my Twitter and my website. So this covers my experiences when I've kind of started building a robot properly. So, I mean, I've been interested in since 1998. I kind of tried to run a robot club at secondary school. So teenage years on building little combat robots that never quite worked. So this talk is covering kind of what I've seen, what I've observed, what I've kind of my mental model of how it works and what you want to do in order to build a robot that will be effective and not suck. So when you're building your robots, the first thing to do is decide what weight category you're going into. The two big popular ones at the moment are the heavy weights, which are 100 kilos. These are the big heavy robots. They're the ones that you would see on, say, battle bots, the American TV series that just restarted up last month and did six episodes. And they cost maybe 2,000 pounds. That's several thousand euros, dollars, what have you. So they're big, they're expensive. And because they're big, you can put an awful lot of high-powered weaponry on there and they generally don't... They can do a lot of damage to themselves and others. Not something to get started in. Further weight combat robots, on the other hand, they're about 30 and a half kilos or 30 pounds if you're American. And they're a lot cheaper. They're more in the 800 mark. So you can feasibly build one or two of these robots. And they're smaller, but you can still pack quite a bit of heavy, high-powered weaponry in them. So it's a bit more friendly for learning the ropes and figuring out what works, what you prefer weapons-wise. Oh, go too fast. Right, so... Well, I mentioned the money in relation to how much weight class is. It's weight is your currency. You can always find more money to spend on it. But you are limited by how many kilos you can spend on it. And you've got to spend it on your chassis, so they're kind of the skeleton of your robot. You've got to spend it on the arm or the skin to protect your robot. You've got to spend it on the wheels and the motors to make it move, the motion generating stuff. And of course, the most important, you have to spend it on the weapon. You can't spend too much on the weapon because then you're very slow and you don't have much armour and you're quite weak. But you can't spend it all on motion because then you don't have much armour and don't have much weapon. So you have to find the right balance that works for you. So the chassis. So the chassis of the robot is pretty much what everything bolts into. Like I said, it's a bit of a skeleton. One thing to keep in mind is because everything's bolted to it, everything will translate through it. So every time someone drives into you, the shock of that will translate through your chassis. So you have to, you want to make it light and rigid. So it doesn't flex too much and it doesn't kind of break apart. And I mean, some of the battle bots, robots tried to go with a slightly lighter and a bit more flexible chassis and that didn't work out too well for them. Generally you find rigid chassis work well. Flexible one's not so much. So the other thing is there are some weapons out there that will launch you up into the air. So when you come back down again, thanks to gravity, you get to get forces from slightly weird angles from that. So you need to also be able to resist them or at least deal with them. You can cheat slightly. So what you can do is you can say I'm actually going to make my armor the chassis and then you bolt everything into the armor. You end up putting a bit more weight into the armor to do that, to kind of put mounting points in. And it means that if your armor sustains a big hit and gets bent out of shape, your chassis then ends up having to be bent out of shape, which could be bad, say, makes one of your wheels lift off the ground so now you've lost your motion, which sucks. So there are advantages, there are disadvantages to cheating and making it your armor. So this is the robot I'm building. It's a featherweight and this is its chassis. It's about 400 millimetres by 450 millimetres. So it's 450 vertically, 400 horizontally. It's using drill motors for the motion and the weapon. I think I've over-engineered this chassis quite a bit. It's far too rigid and far too strong and not light enough. So the silver bits are aluminium C-section in 1 eighth inch or 3.125 mil thick and then it's got blanking plates welded on the ends of them to keep them solid and then I've drilled and tapped them. It breaks down quite nicely but I think it's far too strong, which means I've had to lose out on other parts. So the other one is armor. So you can't dodge all of the attacks that your opponents will throw at you. You can dodge some of them by being fast and nippy and practicing your driving but there will be a point where you accidentally end up in a corner and they'll ram into you or they'll get a lucky hit on you. So for featherweight robots, most armor in the UK seems to be a type of steel called wear plate so these are steels that have been specifically heat treated and have made up of special alloys and they've got similar properties to say titanium but they don't cost anywhere near as much. It's also quite easy to work them. Titanium likes welding itself to drill bits quite easily and that ruins the drill bit and the titanium. Titanium is expensive so it gets painful. With steel wear plate, it's basically just steel. Another cheaper alternative often used for first time robots is thick plastic. So chopping boards are made out of plastic called HDPE and you can buy that in quite thick sheets maybe 20 mils thick or so that's just under an inch. So you buy that and you can basically cut it up. It's quite easy to work with because it's plastic so you can cut it up and you can build armor out of it because it's very cheap. You can build lots of bits of armor for it so you can swap them out as they get damaged and that works out quite well. One thing to do when you're building your armor is you've got to think a bit about the geometries of it, the shape. For some weapons for say spinners they have bars that spin around and if you have sharp corners the bar will hit that sharp corner and it'll catch, it'll grip on and it will then rip your armor off which is bad. So you want to try and have everything sloped in slightly just so it's more likely the glancing blows will then bounce off and redirect the force rather than just trying to resist it. So I've then gone and broken all these so I've got straight sides on mine I'm using steel wear plate so I've got sharp corners and I've got straight sides the two things I said not to do so I'm a terrible person. It'll be interesting. So mine's wrapped up in 4mm hard ox which is a steel wear plate that's around the outside the orange thing in the middle is the lifter arm that's made out of 3.8mm wear plate that's been made up and welded and then the top and bottom armor for me is 5mm polycarbonate I just wanted to see what I wanted to be able to see the insides of the robot if I was slightly more paranoid say for overhead axe weapons you'd probably want to move on to more steel wear plate or thick plastic thicker polycarbonate I mean polycarbonate is quite a nice plastic but it's a bit pricey and it's HTTP is a bit more easy to work with so motion's quite important basically as I've got it lets you control the arena it lets you be everywhere where your opponent's weapon is not you can line up and you get yourself into a position where your weapon can attack his sides and his rear and he can't attack you and you can get away from him trying to attack you you can try and get him into a corner so he can't maneuver much so that's what you want to do I mean I see a lot of these fights end up on YouTube and you can watch through them and say it's research or just enjoy the fact that robots are getting destroyed and one thing that I see coming up quite often is a lot of people don't do too much practice with their robot so they're not too good at controlling it around the arena it's not easy especially when it's driving towards you because you've then got to flip the left right so you have to move the stick right and then it steers left that kind of messes with your brain a bit but if you do a fair bit of practice with it you should be able to get it so you can avoid you can actually get it doing what you want it to do nice and quickly the other thing I see quite a bit of on the YouTube things is people just basically going straight from standing still to full speed that's not really controlled that's just kind of bumping off everything you want to avoid that you want to try and kind of be the right speed for the position so you know go slow to try and accurately position yourself correctly you want to keep an eye on the steering slow down before you hit stuff driving full speed into the arena sidewalls is just as bad as your opponent driving full speed into you it's not something you want to kind of happen if you can help it so for further weights, common drill for common things to move your robot around are cordless drills the price for those has come down greatly in recent years so you get an 18 volt cordless drill you rip off all the plastic you mod the... it's got a little torque control clutch to stop it from stripping the gearbox great for drills, terrible for robots so you jam that somehow and that gets you a fairly cheap, powerful drive motor and then to control the motor you generally use cheap Chinese brushless motor controllers that have been re... or they have the firmware hacked and modified you just program them up and it then looks like a brushed motor controller the Chinese RC kind of market has been great for combat robotics because it's just dropped the price out for a lot of the internal electronics you can now buy very cheap brushless motors which are great for spinning weapons you can buy cheap speed controllers which for both are brushed and brushless and you can get cheap RC equipment so the remote controls that let you control the robot that's dropped in price massively and also gone up in functionality as well you can get some really amazing control setups that's come out of drones and the rest of it so that's my setup you can see the aluminium seat section there at the bottom so I've got two 73mm diameter wheels I've got a belt drive linking the two and then the motor and the speed controller are mounted at the back and then the speed control is on a bit of isolation so try not to translate shock through to it it goes quite fast I haven't done the maths and figured out exactly how fast my one travels but I generally joke that it goes faster than you can run so keep your eye on it, watch your ankles so another big one is the weapon so you've got an idea of now of the chassis shape you want to have, the armour and the wheels next the most important fun one is the weapon so there's lots of different weapon types out there that you've got the two that I like are I think the most effective and or destructive are flippers and spinners spinners, I mean there's other ones out there you've got the piercing weapons which basically put holes in the other guy and you've got flails which are just things on chains or rope that you kind of whip into them they look nice but they don't really cause much game ending damage spinners can do some amazing amount of damage I don't know if anyone's watched Battle Bots in the US but there's something called Last Rites which has this big metal bar that spins around maybe five centimetres off the ground and then that wangs into the other robots and it was very effective and it ripped a couple of robots completely to bits there's also Ice Wave that was the other one that had a horizontal spinner in addition to horizontal spinners you also get vertical spinners so you get drums since they'll have a drum with teeth on it and now that'll spin spinners look very effective but they have this downside because there's a lot of kinetic rotational momentum energy they can actually damage themselves as well they can do just as much damage to themselves as they can and an opponent just because if they hit them right then they can fall on and the weapon will hit the ground and the shock will translate into the chassis and kind of shake it to pieces and it's rare for spinners to I mean everyone likes spinners because they do the they can destroy an opponent but that doesn't happen too often most of the time it you end up just knocking stuff around flippers on the hand are a lot more singularly effective because you can flip someone entirely out of the arena which is an instant win you don't have to chase them around for the rest of the match and then win to a judge's decision you just flip them straight out that's it, one so yeah, no, those are my two favoured don't think that you can put two weapons on that never works out well you need a certain amount of weight given over to securing the weapon in place so if you've got two weapons you have to have twice that weight and that subtracts so much better just have one big powerful weapon your course again, as with turning your armour into the chassis you can cheat and you can make the robot the weapon so you can build what's called a ram bot so you just build this brick that's got my strong rigid chassis and armour and then you drive it into everyone else at high speed 13 kilos running around at 20 miles an hour it's quite a lot of force quite a lot of momentum and that can do quite a bit of damage so this is my robot and that's a bit of railway rail so you have to have lights on it to show that it's working so I've just got a lifter it's a bit like a flipper but it's a lot easier to make I'm using a linear actuator which is basically a drill driving a threaded rod and a trapped nut so it just extends and shortens it's easier to make, it's less likely to cause any hurt me pneumatics which is normally what's used for flippers is quite dangerous to play with unless you know exactly what you're doing with but yeah so I'm just talking about balance there is no perfect kind of balance setup yet every robot has a slightly different kind of ratio of how everything goes together and what works really well in one season of in one set of robot fights won't necessarily work so well the next time round because people keep perfecting and updating their designs so it's good because it means you have to constantly evolve your robots which is great fun because you're constantly trying to pick yourself against you other people so yeah that's pretty much it these are the resources I use so fightingrobots.co.uk is a big UK website where a lot of people talk about combat robots spark.tools which is probably the best URL I've seen to date is an predominantly American website it's trying to cover a lot of the smaller scales smaller weight classes Robot Wars is the Australian forums they've very much gone into the Australians really have gone into robot combat in a big way and it's where the hacked brushless motors came out of brushless motors to be controllers and each of the I-pi plus one is an American guy called Charles Guarn from MIT who posts very good informative blogs about building robots and silly vehicles he was on the latest version of BattleBots with TeamJSAAB which has got Overdrive which is a very nice robot it was quite nice didn't do too well though so yeah thanks for listening Any questions? Please take a seat for questions or to the microphones Jesus Christ So we have microphones set up on the left and right please head to a microphone if you'd like to ask some dangerous design questions please In the original UK Robot Wars it tended to be as the competition went on it became less accessible to people with less money so people with more money tended to win all the fights at the end do you think there's any way you can keep these accessible to newbies people without much money? Not sure really I mean so you can do stuff like so in America they've got the sportsman subclass so it's the 30 pound combat robots but then they have weapon limits which then means you can enter with a slightly less armored less fancy robot and still win I mean it's kind of it's the weapons if you've got more money you can spend on fancier armors and more powerful weapons so if you limit them weapons then that makes them that kind of sets a maximum on the cost there and then it means you don't have to spend too much on your armor and you end up getting slightly more interesting robot designs and say just spinning a metal bar at several thousand RPM and driving into your opponent as fast as possible okay thank you just technical details the arm is not electrically moved which is compressed air or things like that the arm how does the arm move uh huh so it's on a four bar linkage so then your actuator is just a motor that turns goes through a bunch of gearbox turns a threaded rod and then there's a trap nut that can't rotate so it just moves back and forth and that drives a piston basically that moves the linkages which gets the arm to move up and down could you perhaps Robert tell us a little bit about some of the other things you're doing while you're here at the camp say again sorry could you perhaps tell us a few things about what else you're doing while you're at the camp will you be around to field questions for instance I'll be around for questions afterwards sure and where can people find you if they're looking to discuss I'm living out of the EMF camp over up towards the extra shortest path is there is there own little CC camp robot war going on here today or so there's the HeboCon competition I believe which is the Japanese shitty robot competition where you try and build robots that aren't so great and fight them I believe that's happening today and there's a contest tomorrow for that yeah so we can try our silly robots before we get excited with the combat are there any more questions design questions, series questions is that one coming up now we've got a really small person about to ask you no okay not yet into combat okay thank you very much warm applause that was fantastic