For our final year of combots, we have decided on building a brand new four-wheel drive hammer saw robot named Colossal Avian! This robot will be attending the January 2024 NHRL competition, along with our previous year’s robot, Budget Extinction. The primary weapon of the robot is an articulating arm that swings a spinning steel disk onto the top of our opponents in order to pierce their thin top armor.
A computer rendering of our to-be-built robot, Colossal Avian
The robot’s armor features a large AR500 steel front plow, with forks protruding through the face in order to catch the underside of other robots. On the sides, thick UHMW-PE plastic armor acts to absorb blows coming towards the drive system, and a rear 3d-printed squishy TPU armor is used to cushion rear impacts.
Within the inside of our robot, we house the electronics which use a fairly standard system featuring a split parallel 6S battery pack, radio receivers, ESCs, and brushless motors.
This year, our robot’s drive system has been improved upon the drive of budget extinctions (our previous robot) with larger drive motors, new AM32 ESCs which will provide better low speed control and torque, custom molded wheels, an in-direct belt drive system that isolates impact shock loadings from the drive gearboxes, and a cantilevered drive axle setup that isolates the load away from the drive axles on side impacts. We hope that this will make our bot zippier and more robust than ever before!
To drive the articulating arm, we use a 3520 brushless outrunner coupled to a 48:1 gearbox, which then has a further 18:12 chain reduction, bringing the total gearing to 72:1. Through optimization of the gear ratio, we hope to swing our ½” width spinning disk down onto robots with high speed to get high engagement onto the opposing robot.
In addition, our weapon system utilizes two sets of V-belts in order to power the weapon disk. These smooth V-belts allow some slippage into the system in order to absorb some of the impact load of striking other robots.
The team is super excited to be competing at NHRL, and we hope to put all the experience we’ve gained in our 4 years to the test with an ambitious new robot! Keep updated to see how we do!
