finally a finished cad model. I have all the materials on their way and hopefully by then end of next week I will be showing pictures of the real thing.
Nice job greg. What motors you have powering this beast?
Wow… looks awesome. Good luck. Wish I could afford to make a battlebot and/or had a competition near me.
Never thought I would see Inventor models of battlebots on a FIRST forum, but I guess if its summer and there’s nothing going on, awesome. Besides, it won’t be seeing light in a competition, but I could be wrong. 
(joking, joking…)
Sweet build, can’t wait to see the real thing.
-Joe
What weight class is it going to be?
it is in the feather wieght class (30 lbs)
This looks cool… any chance of seeing the CAD models, so I can draw some influence off of how your design works?
By the way, what made you choose a belt to run your blade instead of chain? (I ask because I know nothing about the field of battlebots)
I like it, battle bots allows you to do a lot of things that many of us wish we could do in FIRST but unfortunately, never get the chance to.
I’m guessing there are no chains because they are more likely to snap in this situation, the belts hopefully would just slip. Would it be a possibility if the weight allows to just go with straight spur gears to get your reduction down, that way you’ll keep your efficiency up a little more than with the belts?
How wide are your wheels? They are your first line of defence against the many plough type bots in competition, so wide wheels are always great (i’m sure greg knows that)
Also do you have a brake in the transmission on that?
Looks great, I love the slotted grille on the side that doubles as a way to lighten the machine. That would look really nice if you made it shinny for competition.
I am using belts strictly because of weight. I would love to use gears but unfortunately i really don’t have the space and weight for them.
The wheels are 1.25 wide colsons.
There are no breaks on the transmissions, but I figure I won’t need them because of the wedges and the fact I can move almost 10 mph.
In the long run I would love to polish then anodize the whole thing (something I have been wanting to try for a while). but since i have a very limited amount of time to actually build this bot I am going to be lucky to get it done.
Another advantage of the belts is that if the blade is stopped through either being damaged or having a bot wedged in/stuck on it, the belt will slip, which should keep the motors from stalling and save a good bit of money over time.
sniff It looks so pretty all assembled sniff
its a cute little robot, but arent the super heavy weights where its at? no way you can put a hpa system in that and get it to throw 340 lbs 10 feet up.
also im curious as to why a blade would be mounted on top of the robot?, to me it just seems harder, because you have to get the other guy on top before you do damage.
by the way, very clean and good looking cad.
its a cute little robot, but arent the super heavy weights where its at? no way you can put a hpa system in that and get it to throw 340 lbs 10 feet up.
The Super Heavies are super in most ways, meaning super expensive as well, thus being why there are not many built. There is also less of them competing than the Featherweight class this is being built for. For RoboGames '07 there are 29 Featherweights registered while there are only 7 Super Heavies (http://buildersdb.com/view_bots.asp?eventid=196).
also im curious as to why a blade would be mounted on top of the robot?, to me it just seems harder, because you have to get the other guy on top before you do damage.
The wedge fed design is meant to feed the other robot into the blade, the blade will hit the other robot (hopefully) from underneath and will send it skyward, of course the disadvantage is if the opponent has a lower wedge then you can’t get any hits with the blade which is why wedge fed blades are generally only fed one way and have the blade sticking out the other side so they can wedge feed the blade and use it normally.
-Greg (Not the one posting the CAD, if you were temporarily confused)
Exactly. one of the downfalls of having an exposed blade is that taking a side hit on it can do major damage. We felt that even with the possibility of not getting hits with the weapon we could do fine in the chance that their wedge was lower. After competing at one competition the biggest issue was that our lowest wedge (we called it the skirt) would get damaged and then it would be impossible to wedge anyway. Typically I build combat robots for one event, but I think I might re-build this one. If I do I will be removing one of the wedges making it one sided, and also putting a more powerful motor on the blade.