I view Battle Bots comments as a good opening. Our goal is to make stem cool, not spread the First Koolaide. I explain that FRC is an high school competition and not the same as battlebots
2 Likes
We need this kind of power on FRC drivetrains.
Week 1 update: The field perimeter has been reduced to a pile of scrap metal.
7 Likes
Unfortunately our team has had 10 seasons at the school and our principal still thinks it is battle bots, hasn’t seen a single match online or in person.
2 Likes
We have a new Heavyweight bot built up called “The Twins” which is 2x 125lb robots with the same drivetrain power we’ve used for the 250lb robots, and also an additional 200+ lbs of magnetic downforce to the steel floor each.
They are just silly to drive and definitely have taken and will take more work to reign in to be fully useful at that speed/acceleration.
On the thread topic I’ve had FRC people ask me plenty what the Battlebots event is like and the answer is mainly:
“Picture a 2.5wk long FRC event, where everyone there really cares about good matches”
Everyone is just as helpful as FRC and excited to talk about what they’ve made
I was very very happy when I got to see picture of my wonderful Battlebots team on the kickoff stream for FRC this year, recognition from FIRST that alumni are out in the world doing other cool things was an awesome step for them and I credit Blair for fighting to show it off. (He had talked to @Andrew_Rudolph to get FRC headcounts on teams)
-Aren
19 Likes
Permanently or electronically controlled? I had a similar idea for my hypothetical bot but I was concerned about the power draw from an EM, but I didn’t want to have to fight the extra down force when I was driving around chasing someone
Or, perhaps a MagSwitch-like solution? That being two high-power magnets, one of which can be rotated manually/pneumatically to either boost or cancel the combined magnetic field. I use the pneumatic variety for automotive tooling (sheet metal resistance welding/handling); nothing to the tune of 200lbs but there’s some we’ve used that were up there; the model I use for everything these days is 75.4lbs breakaway rated (and compact, about the size of a couple chicken nuggets).
1 Like
Permanent magnets are typical, you pretty much find a sweet spot where you’re getting good downforce but not so much that you’re sticking to the floor and running the risk of getting high-centered on ferrous debris. For a normally driven robot, there isn’t really a circumstance where you’d selectively want less downforce, it helps you gain traction to accelerate and maneuver better to chase somebody down. You don’t necessarily want to root yourself in place for defensive purposes like you described in your hypothetical – on a solid hit, it can be better to dissipate some energy into getting thrown than it is to tank all of that kinetic energy.
There are teams out there running electromagnets, typically for designs like Beta which demand instantaneous spikes of downforce well past the point where the robot can drive with it. Don’t know of anyone in that situation who has tried a magswitch style approach (downforce assisted hammers are rare, technically ambitious designs to begin with,) but that’s an interesting idea!
1 Like
My usual response to “like Battlebots?” is along the lines of “Battlebots is super cool and I have mad respect for those folks because there is so much engineering involved in those robots, but it’s also really expensive, and it’s hard to sustain that level of engineering complexity and resources for a high school program.”
Thank you so much for this explanation (and the one from your 2022 post)! I’ve seen a lot of insights on the mechanical/materials engineering aspects (mostly from following Hypershock and Witch Doctor early on, and also from @Aren_Hill ) but I never saw much about or considered the challenges on the electrical and programming side. This is absolutely wild.
4 Likes
The advantage of doing a lot of outreach. We make our school look good in the community. It is a continuing job keeping the administration educated that it is more than just robots.
4 Likes
Seems Reasonable’s approach to highly engineered and meta defying robots is definitely what drew me back into Battlebots viewership and made my wife an even more rabid fan that I am. I am still in awe of the ingenuity in Blip’s flywheel flipper.
2 Likes
One other fun trope in the land of combat robots is that anyone coming over from FRC/FIRST programs says “just put swerve on it” , I am doing my best to fulfill this
-Aren
25 Likes
Seems Reasonable is as big as it is because that’s how many smart people it takes to convince Aren to not do it.
In all seriousness combat robotics is hard. It requires every facet of a frc team to run one across way fewer people.
Friendship
Business
Engineering
Design
Manufacturing
Strategy
PR
Emotional support
For example very few, if any, FRC team have the in-house capability to machine AR 500 steel let alone bend it. That requires friends and sponsors. It’s also easier to convince sponsors being a highschool team, it becomes hard mode when it’s just a team trying to destroy stuff.
It equally requires a brand and social media presence to build and maintain a fan base. That’s needed to get leverage to get accepted season after season.
The speed controllers are not plug n play, a misconfiguration in the setup can smoke a $500 motor controller or equally as expensive motor.(VESC 75V 300A Black Anodised Non Conductive CNC housing)
Imagine going to a FRC match and having your robot be a complete write off, that’s the reality of battlebots.
It’s hard, I recommend trying it sometime, even with the full support resource of Seems Reasonable and Witch Doctor my friend group couldn’t pull it off.
Anyone that dismisses it probably hasn’t taken the time to consider how challenging it can be. I joke about the size of Seems Reasonable, but everyone there has a job and are an infinite wealth of experience and knowledge from all aspects of life and stem. It’s the reason they have a world championship banner in BB.
Build a 1 or 3 pounder kit or your own design and go to local fight night. There is a lot to love and the light weight community only gets better as it grows.
11 Likes
It’s criminal to not shout out Andrea from Witch Doctor and her efforts in youth combat robotics and the Camp Witch Doctor program. Andrea and the team pour their heart and soul into improving accessibility and education in this space.
6 Likes
This year I answer the question differently… After the damage I have seen on robots this year, I reply “getting closer to that.” 
I don’t think there should be animosity towards any robotics organizations, whether its Battlebots or VEX. It’s unnecessary. I’ve unfortunately had a lot of rude remarks about our team thrown at me from local VEX teams just because we are a FIRST team, and I don’t understand why its even warranted. (Had a VEX member from my school rip down a recruiting poster for our team just because he felt VEX was superior. I was not happy about that as a student.)
We all like building robots and have a passion for STEM… Why worry so much about how different they are when they achieve the same goals? That and I like our team having ties to the Switchback Battlebots team through our founding mentor, so I don’t find the question as annoying anymore when I get to talk about them. I’ve always been a huge Battlebots fan, and doing FIRST helps scratch that itch I’ve always had.
Having a preference towards one or the other is fine, but “hating” on any one is not needed. Plus, I bet if you went into the Battlebots pits and asked how many were FIRST Alumni, you’d probably see about half the room with their hands up.
2 Likes
My current response to the “like Battlebots” question is something like “Battlebots is like MMA, FRC is like football”. The explanation is that in MMA, the goal is to knock your opponent out; in football, knockouts can happen but the goal is to put the game piece in a scoring position.
That usually is enough to get the person asking to listen enough to understand what actually goes on.
Which one is superior? A Battlebot could wreck an FRC robot, but can’t accomplish the primary game objective repeatedly. Kind of a wash, that. Different competitions with different goals. That’s like asking whether the NHL or NBA is the better pro sports league, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
1 Like
I really loved Woodie Flower’s 2018 kick off speech.
First he discussed how humans are hardwired towards tribalism as a deeply ingrained survival skill:
We are pre-wired toward tribalism - that one includes some very powerful urges. Now, tribalism gave humans a huge advantage over other creatures: we learned to work together, to share and to protect one another but on the other end of the tribalism spectrum is kill the other tribe
He referred to that as our “8 bit programming” (video game themed year) but we are now 64-bit machines and we need to use our 64-bit programming:
Gracious professionals know how to pick out the good parts of tribal instinct and reject the bad. Compete like crazy but compete fairly and ethically. Listen to the empathy bubbling around in your GP brain: clearly any type of bullying is out, clearly any type of hostile behavior is out, there are many more subtle ways primitive incarnations can override GP
Emphasis mine.
This is all to say humans tends to form these tribal associations without even realizing. Some people are in the FRC tribe or the FTC or the VEX or the Battlebots tribe and hate the other tribe as some sort of deeply ingrained instinct. To walk like Woodie is to overcome those tribal instincts.
The easiest way, IMO, to overcome them is to meet the other “tribe.” Attend events, volunteer if you can, maybe even compete: most importantly, talk to the people who are doing the different thing.
21 Likes
I haven’t seen a lot of animosity, but I do hear people make the comparisons. I haven’t competed in BattleBots myself, but I have considered it. I work for a Federal Lab that puts robots on other planets (look me up if you want to know where) and FIRST Robotics, Battlebots, and pretty much any other robotics competition and/or commercial product is way different than what we do.
When I was a group supervisor, I had several people in my group that were participating on top rated BattleBots teams. They put in a lot of hard work and learned a lot really fast. Many of them were fairly recently college graduates and the stuff they did and learned doing BattleBots helped them to come up to speed and develop more creative, inspiring robots that are now truly out of this world.
I attended a talk a couple of weeks ago given by author Simon Sinek, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009) and I’ll leave this with a quote from his book that I believe sums up why FIRST, BattleBots and others are so important to advancing robotics: “Competition is the fuel that ignites innovation.”
Can’t have a space race without Team A and Team B.
3 Likes
what I’ve picked up from this thread is that BattleBots and FRC focus on different aspects of robotics
BattleBots is about power, reliability, durability, and does so with combat under the (accurate) logic that the best way to push those is to challenge people to do their best to break each other, and created an arms race with few rules as long as weapons don’t endanger watchers like would happen with projectiles (has anyone tried taser/EMP based weapons? or are those already banned/neutralized?)
FRC is all about electronics, more advanced systems, and versatility, and did it by providing varied and unpredictable challenges, and preventing the kind of strategies that (by design) turned BattleBots into an arms race
someone feel free to correct any misconceptions I have
2 Likes
I have no problem with VEX, but it’s always felt like FRC with training wheels to me. great for people who are new to this kind of stuff or aren’t looking for the added challenge of FRC, but I struggle to see how it would be superior.
FRC requires manufacturing knowledge to make your own custom parts, the robots are bigger and heavier which means they have to use much more durable materials but also get more complex games and capabilities required of the bots, VEX get the crutch of using prefab parts, which FRC doesn’t beyond very basic or complex stuff like motors are electronics just due to how varied they are, the extra pressures mean teams are on average more hardcore so more is expected of the average team, FRC is also working with significantly higher power means we have a small window for error.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I view VEX as a mix of a causal, junior, and minor league version version of FRC, BattleBots, and similar programs. feel free to correct me if I got something horrifically wrong