This is a brand new class of robots we're considering. No-one has built one yet, but you can expect them to be quite popular when they get going. As the name suggests, these robots have a 1kg weight limit (2kg for walkers). They are also larger than Ants - they must fit in a 6 inch cube instead of the Ants 4 inch cube. Other than that the rules are pretty much the same as for Ants. Fights will take place in a comparitively large 2 metre square arena, and will probably be timed at around 3 to 4 minutes.
Run away, hide your children, lock up your pets, this is going to be one dangerous weight class! Saw Ants like PiG, Combatant, Bad Dream and Anticyclone have shown how dangerous the Ants can be, with fights held in protective boxes to prevent the drivers and audience getting injured by flying schrapnell. Some practical weapons for this weight class would be:
Petrol saws, driven by 2 stroke model car or plane engines,
Pneumatic throwers, using model aircraft undercarriage retract cylinders and small gas bottles,
Spring or pneumatic axes,
Kinetic energy weapons eg Hypnodisk, Mauler or Blendo style spinners or Tornado type high speed brute force rammers.
I tried out an idea at the weekend for a kilogam weight limit weapon. This involved supergluing a 126mm circular saw blade to the drive gear from a radio controlled Mini, attaching the gear and saw to the Mini's drive motor, then powering it up. It looked deadly using the lowest speed setting on a 3 stage mechanical speed controller and took about 20 seconds to spin down. I tried it out in a car park after running a couple of R/C cars around with guys from the Society, during which it ran up to very high speed then vibrated so much the glue joint broke off, but with the blade spinning down it took a few little chunks out of the surface of the car park we were in. My idea now is to power the saw with a small 2 stroke petrol engine, the sort they use for R/C cars and planes, as these spin incredibly quickly and have quite a bit of power behind them. It'll probably be belt driven, unless I want my engine exposed to attack.
After the launch of Big Ed's Kilobot page, I have decided to update this page a bit. I built a Kilobot for the Robots at War 3 event in Croydon a couple of weeks ago. Named HoG, it was bodged together in about 4 hours from a hamster ball, two HS300 servos, a R/C car motor, electronic speed control, 7.2V and 4.8V nicad packs, a 4.5 inch circular saw blade, and a load of 6mm ply fretsawed out and hot glued together. It came in at about 1.06kg, not bad seeing as I'm usually a good 25% overweight on my first try at Ants! The saw took a while to spin up (I later found this was partly due to the battery being nearly flat) but it was very powerful, it could cut through plastic almost instantly, in fact it nearly cut the crash test tank clean in half. Over several weapons demonstrations (I couldn't fight it due to a lack of room and opponents!) I cut up the crash test tank, part of a railway sleeper, a block of expanded polystyrene, an air filter from a hovercraft engine, a coke can, a cardboard drinks carton, and a plastic mineral water bottle. While it proved to be a good design with a good weapon, there are several things about HoG that need work. In time I will set up a mini site for HoG, and update it as I finalise the improvements and build the next version.
© Hairy Steve May 2K+1