Shifting topic for this one to playing with other fun combat robot concepts at a 3lb scale (which I would highly recommend before trying things bigger)

Of course for a combat robot the overarching goal is "win fights and events", I (Aren) largely just love how much freedom is allowed for figuring out how to do that, and just how motivated the entire community is to also keep that tough.

"Boop Tech"

For this particular robot approach I kept asking myself the question:

 "how do I put a spinning thing into the bottom of opposing robots reliably"

Anyone keeping track of my shenanigans knows I've had a few goes at this one, including the Teams "Puncher" design for Tantrum Seasons 4,5,6,7 of Battlebots, which managed to win the S6 finals with a bellyshot to Witch Doctor. It's moments like that which keep motivating me to try and answer the question better of "how do I put a spinning thing into robot bellies".

Here's a smattering of whiteboard side sketches over some period of time, all various weird methods of trying to introduce a spinner to an opponents underside.

Do these types of sketches enough and you'll get more and more calibrated to what "real" dimensions look like, but eventually things get funky enough it's time to first up Solidworks and add some real dimensions. The other large advantage here is being able to drag around and move things/change sizes without redrawing and erasing losing fidelity every time.

So believe it or not most of the work of getting to this stage happened in the whiteboard and Solidworks sketches shown above.

The process ended up at goes roughly as follows: 
1. Like many combat robots "get under the opponent"

2. Spin-up blade

3. Make room under the opponent

4. Get a decent swing for good closing speed

5. Win? maybe? hopefully?

Obviously each of those line items has many sub-bullets and various rabbit holes of possible approaches to explore, but the main "battle" chosen was to answer that initial question of "blade -> belly?". Many decisions were made on other robot features to streamline and not get in the way of answering that question, despite my occasional efforts to overcomplicate other things my teammates and friends help steer me back on track (to the best of their ability).

The concept I landed on for rev1 of "Boopsy" was a wide forky "sawblaze-esque" robot with a hammersaw that could travel full 360 around an unlimited amount, and a single position ratchet + 4 bar that made the arm motion lock into a 4-bar with the drive pods to lift both robots and keep the spinning blade off the ground, and disengaging that ratchet at the right time to let the arm keep going.

Which it turns out all of that can happen very quickly, in fact so quickly that I had to explain afterwards to pretty much everyone watching that fight what actually happened.

This robot and concept is still very much a work in progress, but I wanted to take this opportunity to share a bit as to how the development has happened (Also Jonathan from HUGE yelling at me to share more of the funky things I'm dabbling with)

-Aren, Lead of Seems Reasonable Robotics

(I'm going to bug Alex to share some Dutch Oven fun in the future on here)

(If you're interested in learning more about smaller robot combat, check out a team sponsor Repeat Robotics and also NHRL, pretty much the greatest place to go robot fighting at this point)