Lift Off!

Lift Off was a bot designed and built by Aaron Lucas, under team Area 51 robotics. This was his first featherweight, so naturally, Aaron and Justin flew out to Mumbai, India to compete with it in Techfest.

The competition was quite the learning experience, both in life and in robotics. It’s not often you get a chance to travel to such a different culture and interact with so many new people. I think the both of us gained a lot of unique and positive experiences that we can carry for the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately the event format of the competition changed several times, but eventually it landed on a single elimination 4-way rumble format. Having flown double digit hours to get to event, it’s safe to we weren’t happy with the prospective of having one fight and probably being done. So naturally, the strategy going into the first fight was the “[Insert your least favorite rumble winning robot] strat”. For us, perhaps you could call it the “Uppercut strat” ;) Totally joking.

But really the strat is to simply avoid all contact until all the other robots take each other out, and make it a 1v1 with the last, probably broken, robot. This strategy, with some luck, sure enough did work out, and Aaron managed to win the fight, but not without quite a bit of damage to a drive gearbox, which we of course replaced for the next fight.

The next fight was supposed to be a rumble, but only 1 other robot showed up so it turned into a 1v1, cool. Unlucky for us, it was against Team Ua!rrior, the ones who beat us at Battlebots with Black Dragon. So I guess this was a sort of a re-match, except they had a ridiculously good horizontal spinner. I’ll let the picture say the rest :)

Safety

One question I got a lot after returns from India was “how unsafe was the competition?” Unfortunately India has quite a reputation for hosting some of the more dangerous combat events in the world. You can find youtube videos of active weapon events protected only by chicken wire. One of these events which led to a student being hit and going into a coma. It’s fair to say this is a topic of interest for people.

I’m happy to say, atleast in the case of IIT techfest, the event was considerable safer then the what it was only a few years ago — but I believe the event still has a bit more work to do.

The box was made of, what looked like 10 or 12mm polycarb. The box hosted bots with 30lb, 60lb and 120lb weights. One red flag for me was the polycarb had a “wavy” texture to it, especially near where they had fire and pyrotechnics within the box itself. In my opinion, it was adequate for the 30lb and 60lb classes. For the 120lb class, I’m very skeptical, but with almost all Indian bots being drum spinners (which tend to be, relatively speaking, safer and easier to contain), it might be okay for the time being.

The biggest problem they still have is there no test box to test the bots in. This leads to two things: Blocking off a hallway within the campus to test spinners, and in a few cases some teams just full on yolo-ing it within the pit area. The hall way part, to be honest, didn’t bother me too much. It’s not great, but the bots are generally contained. The culture of turning the weapon on within the pit area was horrifying to say the least, and not something I wish to experience again.