The battle’s are done and the results are in — [AltaPowderDog]’s, aka [Carter Hurd], cardboard and foam armor, lightweight Krave robot beat its metal cousins in 2016 and fared well in 2017. How did a cardboard Krave cereal box and foam board robot do that you ask? The cardboard and foam outer structure was sliced, smashed and generally eaten while the delicate electronics, motors and wheels remained buried safely inside.
We covered the making of his 2016 version but didn’t follow-up with how it fared in that year’s Illinois Bot Brawl competition. As you can see in the exciting first video below, despite suffering repeated severe damage to its armor, it won first place in the 1 lb Antweight category!
For 2017 he made another one but managed to halve the weight — and so he made two of them! By starting them both within a twelve-inch by twelve-inch area, they were allowed to fight as a team. How did he make it lighter? Partly it was done by doing away with the ability to lift the metal lip in front, the wheels were reduced from four to two, and a smaller servo was used for opening and closing the mouth. The full build video is shown below along with a video of the 2017 battles wherein he won seventh place.
The 2016 victorious battles…
Making the 2017 robot…
The battles of 2017…
The Krave cereal box robot isn’t the only food-related bot we’ve covered here. Check out the butter passing battlebot and this battlebot made out of a pumpkin.
I’d love to see a battle robot competition that requires the entire robot to be built out of foam core, corrugated plastic (think political signs) and cardboard. Maybe weapons can be made out of aluminum, but everything else (except the electronics and locomotion, of course) has to be foam.
Fitting a tag-team duo into the size and weight restrictions for that class is an accomplishment!
“corrugated plastic”
Corroplast
Thats a brand name… what is your point.
I ran one with some friends at uni last year that we limited things to MDF, Plywood and plastic; did consider limiting down to foamboard etc. but people wanted more flexibility. It was mainly a safety thing, to be honest, as we had next to no money to set it all up, so the arena was made out of whatever we could lay our hands on.
We did a similar thing with cardboard robots. We allowed metal weapons because part of the idea behind having cardboard bots was to maximize destruction while minimizing cost. We just have rules to ensure that the frame is structurally made of cardboard.
https://hackaday.com/2015/09/29/cardboard-robot-deathmatch/
I can’t tell… Are these robots or RC cars? I dont’ see any information on the control system.
Yes, they’re all RC.
That’s way more entertaining than typical battles.