Think outside the box.

I agree hovercrafts would be cool but....

Lets say wheels and treads are outlawed. Walking robots would become the norm, or would they?
What about a robot that rolls. like that Jimmy Neutron toy at Radio Shack. the whole exterior of the robot is the transport.
Its as useful as the hovercraft idea and use s much less battery power to run.

Or a jumping robot....

Or a snake drive....

you say water, who says it would be liquid? A skating robot.

Well that was fun
Eric

Yes, but the ice thing would be hell for most teams to build a practice field with.

Anyhow, a walking robot wouldn't be that difficult. Just look at Wyachi from Battlebots.

Whyachi uses wheels. Besides walking robots are very very slow

my best friend is of the opinion that we should build a hover craft, even if wheels and treads *aren't* outlawed :D
sounds fun, huh?
true, it might be hard to get enough lift for a 130 lb bot...

Hate to burst your bubble, but it's been done. Back in '97 (I believe that was the year), a team (I believe it was the MIT team but I could be wrong) built a hovercraft. It couldn't do anything but float around as a hovercraft. So FIRST used it for the placebo (then it was 1v1v1 but they couldn't always field 3 teams so sometimes there was a "placebo" that really didn't do anything) that year. I personally didn't see it but I've heard good things about it.

Matt

Defining exactly what is and isn't a walking robot is pretty tough as BattleBots has found out. The Season 3.0 Whyachi bots and some others found a clever way to make walking robots that were just as fast and powerful as wheeled bots.

The Season 3.0 Whyachi's used a clever cam mechanism that allowed the robot to travel very fast (they were running at 25% of top speed on TV) and was almost indistinguisable from wheeled movement. By doing this they got a huge weight bonus which really helped out their robots. These walking mechanisms are now outlawed and walkers get a small weight bonus now.

For Season 4.0 all four of their bots were wheeled; Son of Whyachi, which used to be a HW, was brought into the SHW class and isn't technically a walker anymore.

Dan

Getting lift on the hovercraft isn't hard, I'm sure a drill motor or two could do it (albeit not terribly high.) Getting *thrust* is super hard, and going fast in a small space or having any sort of control is much harder.

Watching a FIRST game with hovercrafts would be pretty boring I think.

Dan

It was '96

Hover crafts
 

Last year at nationals, some members of our team built a hovercraft in our pits out of spare kit parts and 4 model airplane propllers. I believe we did it with 4 Fischer-Price motors. It worked fairly well. It only took a couple of hours to build.