← Outside of the Box
Loading summary
Transcript171 lines
- [00:02]
Matt
Christine hosts a roundtable of builders running through the various archetypes of robots in this episode of Outside of the Box.
- [00:09]
Brandon
Are you going to win the ground game or are you going to win the reach war? It's like you got to win more.
- [00:13]
Liam
Now that your robot is essentially a manufacturing like industrial grade press being put into a fighting robot box, you somehow have to design it to not get instantly splattered against the wall by something that spins very, very quickly, like a vertical horizontal spinner or a hammer saw which can reach over and hit your hydraulic press.
- [00:38]
Christine
Hello everyone, and welcome to a special episode of Outside of the Box where we're doing a little bit of a roundtable, but to talk about something that I wanted to talk about for a long time. To me, archetypes and variation in archetypes are one of the most important parts of combat robotics and something I really love. But there are so many different theories about different archetypes and how they compare to each other or, you know, what's the best archetype to start out with all of those things. So we're going to touch on a lot of that because we have so many different types of robots that we're going to talk about. And I feel like I have a pretty good group of people to do that today. So I have Liam, Brandon, Matt and Brian here who have all built multiple archetypes of ro. So I'm really excited to get into it. Welcome all of you back to the show.
- [01:36]
Brian
Hello.
- [01:37]
Brandon
Hello.
- [01:38]
Brian
Hi. How you doing?
- [01:40]
Matt
Hello.
- [01:41]
Christine
Well, I'm great. I'm really excited to talk about this. And we're going to start off in kind of what I would call a not typical place for robots, which is the more ring shell, melty brain, like all of those spin spinners, because I think they get confused the most. I think if somebody sees a flat disc, they kind of all want to call it the same thing and it's really not. And so I want to talk about not only the fact that it's, it's not the same, but also the differences between a ring spinner, a shell spinner, a melty brain. I mean, like the examples that I have ring spinners I feel like are maybe less common. Like the two that came off the top of my head that I thought of like Moon Cake and Double Stuffed are both ring spinners that exist in an hrl. And then you have your shell spinners like of course, chonky, Grim ripper gigabyte in Battlebots, and then melty brains like Project Liftoff and the Greatest challenge. And I think, you know, all three are very different. So whoever would like to start talking about the. The differences to compare and contrast them?
- [02:59]
Matt
If you want, I could talk about meltes because I know a little bit about them. So generally melty brains are just two motors or wheels that spin. Sometimes there are single ones. I think there's one robot that does a single wheel. But the idea is it spins the entire body, meaning all three pounds is spinning. Typically for a melty brain to function, it requires some form of sensor feedback using usually some form of gyroscope. Usually they get a little Raspberry PI or something or an Arduino. That way they can kind of tell where they're spinning. And then they have a light that indicates the direction and then they pulse the motors to effectively move forward backward by slowing it down and causing it to accelerate and move prime. Examples are like Project Liftoff, Deep Melt, Halo, which is an older one. And there's one other that comes to my mind the greatest challenge. Those ones are generally like the ones that point to. The big thing to keep in mind with those is they're better at lower weight classes, at least at the moment, because the physics just kind of work a little better. Easier to spin up that kind of thing. Where bigger weight classes. I think the only ones we've really seen is Project Liftoff 12. And I don't know if Project Liftoff 30 ever even made it into the box. But both those kind of seem to struggle with traction, whether it be their cleats, which is what Liftoff has spent years perfecting to get the traction to speed up immediately, which is why it gets up to speed in like half a second, which is dig holes into the floor. And I don't think anyone's really tried it with other means of locomotion to my knowledge.
- [04:36]
Brandon
But yeah, just with like cube square law, it's just. It's so much inertia that they have to spin up. Once you get to the larger weight classes, it's just becomes so much harder.
- [04:45]
Matt
And typically on like the difficulty scale, melty brains are probably the generally simple mechanically. When you think about it, it's just two motors, belter direct drive spinning. Meaning from a mechanic standpoint, it's the simplest. It's just give me power and make me spin. But from motion. Like there are whole discords and open open source projects for making multicode to move. And Liftoff took like two and a half years to get to the point where it dumpster because they just figured out all the Things that went wrong. But it is also, I think the ones with the most room to still grow with deep melt, for example. Like, I know Jim has worked a lot on automating stuff more to help with movement. That way they could kind of flip it back where they could make it like do a combo where it could be able to do arcs and stuff. But generally I think they're the simplest mechanically but the hardest to perfect.
- [05:36]
Brandon
I could talk a bit about shell spinners because I do know a lot of the struggles that Zoe went through back when she was making Bugsby. So when it comes to the shell spinner, it's basically like mechanically it's very similar to like an overhead horizontal, except the shell then comes down lower, almost similar to an undercutter, completely covering it. So the chassis of the robot is not spinning, but there's just a, you know, a shell around the robot that is spinning. Now the general like challenge when it comes to building a shell spinner is the fact that there's just such a large difference in weight between the weapon and the chassis. So a lot of times like, like regular wheel shell spinners, a lot of the challenge is that whenever you try to spin up the weapon, sometimes the chassis itself wants to spin on the inside and it can get more complicated if the weapon is disturbed at all and you, you try to spin it up because if the robots hit the shell is probably going to be hitting the ground. So if you try to spin up the weapon, it's just going to spin up the chassis. So what you oftentimes see in a lot of shell spinners is a lot of them become shufflers or non traditional locomotion robots in order to get like the inside to be proportional and also still have the insane inertia of the shell spinner. Generally like horizontals in general benefit the most from being like ntl, but shell spinners benefit a lot, the most from it, I'd say just due to the difference in the, the weight. So yeah, you know, good examples of shell spinners you got probably chonky. I know Drift is another newer one. Are there any. I can't think of any prominent beetle ones though.
- [07:33]
Liam
I don't know beetles a lot less. There was a older robot, I forgot its name, but it was on YouTube. They actually had a little tutorial for it. But in the, in the case of that, the shell has to be very thinned out. I remember in the UK actually there's a robot that was like a billet H and W body with teeth, very low slung in order to get to work. But it's very hard to do it because at that point, you're bouncing around like a hockey puck. And the same problems as the melty brain.
- [08:00]
Brandon
Yeah. And then I was gonna say one
- [08:02]
Matt
of the things that Liam pointed out with non traditional is aside from the weight, typically the motion system for shufflers are walking mechanisms that have a large contact patch with the ground, Whether it be cleats or rubber covered feet, which, if you can imagine a wheel, you have the contact area of the bottom of a circle, where, if you have the full foot, it can help you kind of stabilize and not spinning yourself as much, which is partially why chonky and drift probably were able to spin up a little bit better without completely doing burnouts, because they also just have so much more. I'm gonna say, not active. What's the other one? Crud. Like a better coefficient of friction in a passive sense where they just don't want to move generally as much. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Just wanted to point out too.
- [08:47]
Brandon
Yeah, that's also a big portion of it. But yeah, I think we're talking about, like, them in, like, the. The smaller weight classes, like you said, Brandon. It's just in the. In the smaller weight classes, things just happen so much faster. And the robot. The level of energy that these robots have compared to, like, you know, their weight and stuff just makes them want to fly, like, all over the place. And I would generally say that shell spinners have a worse disadvantage state because they need to completely settle before they start spinning up the weapon. And that just doesn't tend well to the. The Beatles, where things happen so fast. But, you know, in the larger weight classes, things are just so much heavier. So they just stay planted better.
- [09:26]
Liam
Yeah. When you get to a gigabyte at the BattleBots level, they had the benefit of both a lot of weight, but also magnets because of the steel arena. So they have the ability to sit in place and spin up very, very, very quickly, which allows it to be instantly deadly. And if it weren't for the shelf, probably get a lot more wins. But that's a different story for a different time.
- [09:45]
Matt
And with that, there's one that Brandon reminded me of that is £3. It's pretty good, yo. From Tim Bones. And Tim actually talked about that once where someone asked like, you've never really landed on your head. He's like, well, I have magnets. I just stay planted to the ground because magnets. Cuz I. In the Netherlands, we have steel. Um, so that kind of speaks back to the whole traction is king for shell spinners. If you don't have traction, you just spin in yourself. And it's unfortunate
- [10:13]
Liam
and I guess to go off of it, to go speak about ring spinners since they're kind of related. They're certainly a similar vein to the other two, but slightly different. So a big part to note is that with the shell spinner, the shells encompassing the entire, you could say half of a chassis. So that means that you have it reached down, but exactly as Matt's doing with his fingers, the entire top of it is now covered by the shell. So now what that means is you have very limited ability to move when inverted. And most times physics keeps them from having to do so because naturally the gyroscope is going to want to keep staying in place or magnets. But a ring spinner is different than both of those or than both of those things. So with the ring spinner it isn't that you're taking the whole robot and spinning it, nor is it you're taking a very big piece of metal that's covering the entire robot and you're spinning that. Rather, a ring spinner is actually taking a single, you could say ring of material. So it's only a certain thickness of a certain material and it goes across the mid area of the chassis. So that means is that now your robot is able to be fully invertible. So as a shell spinner might get stuck on its head, if the, let's say self writing mechanism, often used like a little pole sticks out from the robots comes off, then it will break and it'll get stuck. The ring spinner in theory can have the weapon hit, it can get bounce on all the time, and if it gets inverted, it will keep driving because there's no limitation to its top or bottom areas. The downside is that ring spinners, because it's only this very thin area of support, that means that all of your support has to go directly into maintaining that ring in all three dimensions. So instead of just thinking to yourself, well, I have a shell, that means I can sort of mount it to a top mounting piece, kind of like a gigabyte does, or even like bloodsport, if you want to like add a shell around bloodsports weapon. You can't really do that. If you have a ring spinner. Your ring spinner has to have a set of bearings on the top and bottom of the ring and then behind the ring that allow it to take shots and keep rotating the entire time. So it becomes a very complex mechanical problem because now you have to make sure that everything's staying aligned and this one piece of material is sitting out there. And the big benefit of the ring, which is like people, some people do it, is because it's the most physically precise or physically tuned specific method doing so because all of your mass is in this outer area. And according to the laws of physics, your inertia is based on your distance from your center point. So of all of your masses in the furthest point furthest away from your chassis spinning up the highest speed possible, it's the most. There's the word efficient. Ability to hit somebody and then constrain it as well as being able to self. Right. So in a sense it's going for the big hits like a shell spinner does. But it's going to be more versatile, more invertible. And unlike the ring spinner where the ring is, sorry, where the robot has to be both the weapon and control with the same drive motors to spin the whole thing, this has the ability to have the drive wheels still control themselves like a normal robot does while having the ring do its own thing. But in this case the downside tends to be generally very complex way of constraining the ring without creating a path to failure. Because all it takes is a very big vertical spinner going up to your ring, uppercutting it and then knocks out of alignment and then the whole thing's dead. And that's why only a few of them I've been able to see. I think, I think was it event
- [13:38]
Matt
horizon or singularity and event horizon which are almost the same thing now are big ones. There's like as pristine said mooncake and double stuffed Oreo. I think there is. I'm thinking of inertial. That's a shell spinner in the 12 pound class. I thought there was like a 12 or a 30 ring that existed for a little bit.
- [13:57]
Brandon
Yeah. It makes sense that they're more prominent in the smaller weight classes just because you know, materials relatively are stronger, you know, the same material, but since everything is smaller that they're going to be way less likely to bend. And as you get into the larger weight classes, you know the steels not really getting much stronger. And as Brandon said, once that bends it's going to be kind of rough to recover from that.
- [14:20]
Matt
And generally these three styles of full spinning robots, their big advantages everywhere is deadly. There is no safe place to hit it per se when it's up to speed. But it. But they are also as we've all kind of pointed out, probably the most complex and even the most not expensive, but a high cost to entry given failures and tolerancing and losing a ring to one hit, that kind of thing.
- [14:45]
Liam
Yeah, high failure, high reward. But I suppose if the goal of fighting robots is to hit things, they're really hard, then that's a great design to go after for sure.
- [14:56]
Christine
Brian, did you have anything to add on those types of robots?
- [15:00]
Brian
So when we started this, my thought was Liam King, Brandon Young, right. You got Matthew Landry and then Brian Jackson. And so in my head I was going, one of these things is not like the other. And I think this first conversation kind of proved that. So I don't have anything to add. I was actually listening and learning. Probably like a lot of people that are going to be watching this because that's the one archetype that has always kind of amazed me because there's just so much engineering that actually goes into it so much that I don't understand. Which is one of the reasons why I really appreciate it because like, I look at them and I just think there's no way, like my brain, like I'm looking at it and I'm just confused the more that I stare at it. So it's, it's, it's a pretty amazing archetype. I think they're really, really cool robots. But I can't say that I would have a lot to add on top of what these three have already said.
- [15:46]
Christine
Yeah, fair enough. Well, next we're gonna go to like the grouping that I feel like there's the most controversy as far as what the difference is, which is hammers, saws and hammer saws, which are three different things. So just to throw out there hammers, of course, the best examples that I can think of are typically in battlebots, robots like Shatter and Beta, hammer saws like Megatron Sting Operation and the Wall Part 2, and saws like Mako and Dragon King from BattleBots. It's just funny, if you ever try and tell Julian that Mako is a hammer saw, that's, that's a fun conversation to have. So there's just a difference between these robots. And so I'm curious to hear everybody's take on that, what the differences are and you know, level of competitiveness and like the level of cost to build a robot like this.
- [16:54]
Matt
Liam can talk about one of them.
- [16:56]
Liam
He knows a lot, you know, a
- [16:58]
Brandon
thing or two about hammer saws. So I fought with my, my 12 pound hammer saw for about A year. And at one, at some point, I'm. I'm looking to come back to hammer saws, maybe make a. Looking into making a Beetle right now. But generally, when it comes to hammer saws, they are complicated in the sense that they have a lot more points of failure. You know, instead of three systems, left and right, left drive, right drive, weapon. You have four systems that you need to work in order for, you know, the full thing to function. And generally the hardest part with the hammersaw, the thing that makes it the most complicated, is, okay, what do you do to spin the blade at the end of the weapon? That's really what separates it from, you know, the regular hammer, where you can just kind of, like, swing it, put a bunch of torque on it. You need to figure out a way to spin that weapon at the end. And generally, there's a few different ways you could approach it. One way is like, you know, the traditional that Megatron did originally and what Saw Blaze does is you just belt it from the inside. Now, that usually is like, you have, like, two rails or. I actually didn't. I did it like a weird cantilever, live shaft thing. Don't do that. Generally, the idea with doing it like that is to make it more durable because you're hiding the web of motor inside of the robot so it can't get hit. But the big problem with that, and this is also what. This is, the issue that I found with it and the issue that I pretty sure Jamo also found with it and why he's moved to different, you know, ways of doing it, is that the. The thing about a hammer saw is the weapon is going to be a lot lighter. So. And usually you pin your robot and then you spin up. And whenever you spin up, you want to be spinning at ridiculous speeds. Like, you want to be spinning as fast as possible in order to, you know, pierce the top plate and do as much damage as possible, because you have time to spin up. So you want to be spinning as fast as possible, but with, like, a belted system like that, there's just so much resistance, more resistance than, you know, a regular robot with one belt. Because if you're belting it from the chassis, you know, that's one belt to the pivot shaft and another belt to the weapon. So it's just a lot of resistance, and you just can't get the speeds that, like, you really want to be spinning at. The next other way to do it, which a lot of people do, especially in the Beetle White class, is with either with a direct mount or some sort of hub motor. The hub motor is nice because there's no belts, so it means that it can just spin up. There is a bit more. I feel like there's definitely more resistance than, like, a traditional, like, like belted or geared setup. Just because homeowners usually use, like, a thin, big bearing. But you can spin those things up very fast. And the other thing is that you can make the arm a lot longer, too, because now you don't have to worry about this belt path going through. It's just. You can just make it as long as you want. You can make it curved so you can reach over the robot and hit into the top plate. But of course, the disadvantage is that you gotta have the. Sometimes the hub motors like to die. Either you make your own custom one, which is, you know, a lot of work. You can buy one, but, you know, sometimes they die and you got to pay 40 ish or something bucks for a new one. And then there's the last option, which is you do an indirect setup. I'm kind of looking into that right now after seeing Jamo go to that with his, like, bevel gear setup. Potentially allows you to have your cake and eat it, too. But I don't know. That's still a facet that's really being explored right now when it comes to Hammersaw tech. Definitely in, like, the lower weight classes. You know, I feel like a general theme we've mentioned. In the lower weight classes, materials are, like, proportionally stronger because, you know, everything's smaller, energy is less. So there's definitely a lot more hub motors. But yeah, it's definitely. That is the hard part about the hammer saw. Getting the weapon to spin up fast enough to deal damage and pierce the top plate without it being, you know, overly, you know, weak and just breaks on impact.
- [21:36]
Liam
But then your benefit is that your arm, because you're throwing it in very actively on a spinny thing, means that you're digging in really, really hard. That's why you want that absurd speed, because in your case, you have, like, a giant tooth that's coming down, and you want that tooth to not only be spinning at infinite speed, if possible, so that. Because it has to go from spinning top speed to stop, so you want it to have as much of that top level so when it stops or by the time it stops, it's. It's imparted, I don't know, a small warhead level of damage into the opponent. So by time, you can do anything. They're already super dead. So it's fascinating seeing that logic going into your robot there.
- [22:14]
Brandon
Yeah. Because like with a normal spinner robot, usually there are diminishing returns on spinning faster because you're going to get less bite. But like, yeah, with a hammer saw, you're like you said, you're literally just forcing the weapon into their top plate. And it's, it's like the, the inertia in the weapon is only as good as you're like, you're able to transfer it, but with the hammer side, you can transfer all of that. So you just want as much as possible.
- [22:39]
Matt
Yeah, so much so that I don't know if we want to transition into saws a little bit. Hammer saws typically swing their arm at, I'm going to say a number and it won't make much sense. Like want to spin it like 18, 20 miles an hour. Just go as fast as possible to swing the arm in because that applies the energy into the plate and gets more bite too. Now the difference is between a saw and a hammer saw. And Jillian will probably explain it better than I will. For reference, the two notable like sawbots I can think of are mako in the three pound class and widdle by widdle from 12. That's an old robot, but that's the last time.
- [23:15]
Liam
Look at you old head over there, huh?
- [23:17]
Matt
Look man, there's sometimes that. There's sometimes sawbots I can point to. And as. What's it called? Christine said Dragon King, I think, and maybe it was Red Devil.
- [23:26]
Liam
I made a little plant as well called softwaffle. That's like fiction. That's like a friction saw, but we'll get there.
- [23:31]
Matt
But the idea is with a sawbot, instead of going for a big impact, you're going for a. Delivering the blade slowly. Not slowly per se, but repeatedly while you're holding someone, making sparks and cutting away material similar to how a miter saw would work. When you're cutting wood, you want to gradually cut material away and then eventually pierce. So there's a bunch of different ways that people do this. Some people try using abrasive saws when you have a harder material to grind away. If you're Julian, you just spend really fast with this one saw that I can't remember the name of from Amazon, he would pull for it. He's not sponsored by them, by the way. I don't know why he plugs them all the time. But the idea is you're pretty much just cutting away material where a hammer saw, sometimes you don't cut the material, you sometimes just dent, which is can sometimes be equally damaging. Depending upon how someone's robot set up, just denting a top plate in could be enough to, you know, lock up a drive motor or, you know, break an esc that's positioned badly where saw is trying to cut through and then cut through the bits. So, like, Julian has cut through so many more batteries, and I think some hammer saws have ever because he just finds a way to kind of get his saw to hit a certain spot and just slice through things, which is pretty impressive.
- [24:47]
Brandon
And then.
- [24:48]
Matt
Go ahead.
- [24:48]
Brandon
Yeah. And then the other thing about a saw, well, whenever people think of like, you know, saws and hammer saws, everybody's like, oh, my God, gotta pierce the top plate. Pierce the top plate, Pierce the top plate. And you know, as a hammer saw, your goal is to pierce the top plate. But as a saw, I mean, if they're just running soft armor, then yeah, that saw is going to cut right through that soft stuff, either TPU or uhmw. But the other aspect of a saw is that if they are running a harder top plate, the goal might not necessarily be to pierce the top plate because the saw can just grind up against the top plate. The saw can sometimes find, like, the vulnerabilities in the robot. Like, you may not think about it, but on the top of the robot, like, a lot of people, like, just put a lot of vulnerabilities that are almost never seen. Weapon motors, belts, even drive shafts. If the saw is able to find the wheel well and poke the drive shaft, like, that could kill the drive. So that's another thing that saws, like, sometimes can just find. Like, I've definitely seen mako countless times. Find the wheel well and then kill the drive.
- [25:58]
Matt
And I'll point to a prime example of what Liam's talking about. This is. This is another deep cut. If anyone remembers the robot rip and tear, you're an old fan. Widow by widdle fought rip and tear once. The reason why I'm saying this is if Widdle by widow was a hammer saw versus rip and tear versus a saw saw, which is it was a saw. What it ended up doing was actually cutting rip and tear in half because rip and tear had all this foam armor to act as, like, stopper. But what it did is it slowly cut through it and then cut the robot in half. If it was a hammer saw, it probably wouldn't have been as effective at doing that. So depending on the situation, sometimes saws can be better than hammer saws. Even though hammer saws are more popular and people point to saying, oh, that robot's going to set me on fire. And as Liam said, they're good at finding weaknesses that sometimes hammer saws can't find just by how they swing. Where Julian sometimes clips belts because the saw kind of hits and then deflects into places where a hammer saw is one swing and then it's got a re spool effectively.
- [26:53]
Brian
Yeah. So something I want to add one, the blade is called Shuziu.
- [26:57]
Matt
I actually just DM him for it.
- [27:00]
Brian
No, actually, so fun. Fun fact. I actually run that same exact saw on Murphy's Law. I have a setup where I can. I have a, you know, custom like TPU hub that I attach it to with just two bolts and it mounts straight to the. The cherry bomb motor that I was running. So I can actually against. It was bent for jelly baby and I was. Or jelly baby and or Mako. And at finals, I was one fight away from. From Mako and I was looking forward to literally cutting through his. That robot and lighting his whole robot on fire, destroying his battery. But I didn't get a chance to run it because I got pine. Well, I got pine victus but my robot just decided to, you know, go to take a nap in the middle of the fight. So. But yeah, that's. That's what I have. I did get it from Julian because I asked him and he's like, why do you want to know? I'm like, no reason. Julian not. Not putting on an undercut or anything. I just. Just curious. So, yeah, that's. That's what it is. There is a robot that I don't know if a lot of people know about because it. It ran a couple times out in Texas, but it was blood of my enemies. And I can't screen share. I would share it, but it's a real compact ant weight that was running a 4 in 1 ESC. It had a brushless, I believe it was running a brushless drive motor for the arm. And then I think it was running some sort of custom hub motor and then two brushless motors as well for the drive system. And it was four wheel drive, but it was. I mean, it was so compact and the arm was so thick and well built that it could actually put the arm down and just run as a vertical and it would basically go to go toe to toe with almost anything else you could throw in the box. So not only was it able to just turn around and hit you as a vert, it could throw the arm into pretty much anything without too much concern. It was the only bot that, when they brought out the. The Alexian, like they had a money box and it was like, whoever could break it open, could you get the money? He scared most of the Beatles because it started to crack and no one else could touch it. But that arm, it threw down so fast and with so much force. It was unbelievable. I think he's got a Beetle, but I haven't seen that one compete. But it's. It's. It's definitely. It's super, super compact. But it's because he threw it all into the four in one. It's. It's a pretty formidable little. Little beat of weight. Actually.
- [29:08]
Brandon
It
- [29:11]
Brian
completely destroyed Tayshawn's or TJ's. You give them a name and then they come up with whatever they want anyway. But destroyed, you know, TJ's ant weight at the time, just straight right in the middle of the plate and cracked through the plate, cut his wires. And I was pretty amazing to watch because that was the first time I'd ever seen a hammersaw, like really in person, cut completely through the soul of another robot.
- [29:31]
Liam
So, you know, that is a big part, I have to say, is like a feature about each different weapon. Just the way you want to damage your opponent, you have to think psychologically. The hammer saw is the dread of waiting for it to go and then like an immediate bomb when it cuts into you. The saw is the slow, deliberate cutting through it where you might think, I'm okay in second one, and second two is getting a little closer and. And second three. Then you're on fire and you're like, ah, that sucked. And then that's all versus, like the hammer, the. The OG original. I mean, I mean, you are the
- [30:03]
Matt
OG original, so you know a lot about that, don't you?
- [30:06]
Liam
Well, time it. Well, what can I say? It's old and I'm immortal. But hammers are classic because you wind up and you hit them really, really hard. And that's just all based on the weight. Classic examples of that. You have Beta, very probably the most famous one in the modern day. You had the judge from the olden days, and that was a beast. I remember lots of other machines in the UK that also had hammer shots that are also very impressive. But the issue is, especially as weapons gotten stronger over time, that now it's like, okay, a hammer could output a relatively small amount of energy because just based on the weight in the distance and how fast you can get in a range of time generally like 180 degrees, which is actually not very long arc depending on how long your arm is. Let's say hammer saw travel same distance of let's say 6 inches between like the back to the front of like a beetle weight. With the hammer saw, you have the weight of the arm multiplied by the energy of the weapon at a radius from the hammer's fulcrum. So if you want to do the physics talk, you're basically taking like a multiplier to a spinny thing that's already being multiplied based on its force. And so when you take that away and just have a hammer, it's just the hammer's mass. In order to do some real damage, you have to have a lot of weight. And so way back when, early 2000s. And so where robots had lead acid batteries and beetle weights were like non existent because they had to like double ace and 9v and stuff like that. Your we your material for for armor was like thin polycarbonate. Like you could go to Home Depot and buy thick enough armor for your little robots. So even with the heavyweights got to speed, they still had to do like £80 in batteries. So they still had to do very thin armor. So if you have a robot like the judge, who people may know today is future incarnation of chump, you have a robot that could output a couple, you know, probably thousands of pounds at its peak. But you're built by like your top plates were so thin, like I could legitimately crater it if you don't layer it up or add little layers of shock absorption like springs alongside polycarbonate levels. But today, especially in small robots, that's almost nothing because you could casually get tigris, which is like woven polyethylene, thicker polycarbonate, titanium, carbon fiber, aluminum, and any of those materials layered up well, or even just like angle tpu, which is just a giant spring, takes all the force out of it. And now you just get a very weird little poking thingy which might look kind of interesting but can't really do damage. And so the hammer is kind of naturally phased out because now lipo batteries and brushless motors mean you can put lots of energy into armor and as much back into the weight of an arm itself. And because of physics, it can only get but so big before it become its own problem. So that's why people have naturally shied away from hammers and moved to the hammer saws, which is an innovation itself. And then saws, which is based off as a people would do anyway. But in the two main camps of hammer saws and saws. The saws is a bit more deliberate, you could say, and adds wrong with time. The hammer saw is like Thor's hammer. It just cracks like lightning. And whatever is in its way might get absolutely exploded in the meantime. And if you can do it multiple times in a match, good chance you destroyed something. But both solve a very, very much control heavy filament to them. Whatever way you're doing it, whether it's a hammer, saw, saw or just a hammer, you still have to very much have your opponent in your control. So it's very much still requiring you to do a lot of this tactical game. And the level of how you damage them comes down to a different rationality of big boom or like deliberate cuts, step by thousand cuts.
- [33:58]
Matt
And I will say with hammers, there is some innovation still people are trying to do. I know that shatter Adam Wrigley and them at talk, they made like a blade with a bunch of different protrusions to try to catch belts. And if I recall during BattleBots, it did actually work once. So there are some interesting ideas still floating around. But as Brandon put it, a lot of people, when they think hammer, they think, let me just put a spinning little thing on the end and I can cut people and be more reliable and deal more damage more effectively.
- [34:28]
Brandon
Yeah, if you're fighting a vert as a hammer, like, your goal is to hit the weapon hub or the belt, like, I guess the advantage is that you can just, you know, swing that thing into the weapon and not matter. And the hammer can get all bent and whatever, and it. It doesn't really matter. But if you hit the weapon hub, you're. I know you're a decently durable robot. You're probably gonna win. But that's like the win condition or if you hit some other vulnerable part of the robot. But they should be able to armor. I would imagine a decent robot should be able to armor most of the robot up, but the weapon belt's harder to armor. So.
- [35:05]
Christine
Yeah, for sure. Well, before we. Before we move on to what I would say are the more common robots that people would see, there's a couple more types that I wanted to talk about a little bit, which is crazy that this is a thing now, but it is drill bots, because people always used to say, put a drill on it, and people have the power of friendship. And Woodpecker are the two ones that I can think of. And then crushers like quantum with battlebots and a robot that I was absolutely terrified to fight inside job. These are two not super common robots that you would see. But I still think it's interesting as an archetype as to why somebody would make a drill bot or a crusher bot.
- [35:56]
Brandon
I mean, I'm not a drill robot specialist, but at least appears to me, especially in the smaller weight classes, that the, I guess, advantage doing a drill is that it's very light for, like, what it is. So, like, the power of friendship. They're a split multi. I. I'm not entirely sure. Potentially they didn't have the weight for a saw. I feel like if they. If you have the weight for a saw, I feel like, like, the saw and the drill are good at potentially very similar things, but I. I feel like a saw is just a little bit better, but the drill potentially has the ability to, like, you know, only hit a certain area, because if you have a saw, you're hitting in, like, a line, but the drill is going to hit in, like, a very particular point. So potentially that has advantages and disadvantages. I mean, we've seen that power friendship has caused a lipo fire. So, I mean, it works. The only other aspect is, like, durability. I feel like the saw is a bit more durable than the drill because I've seen fights where mako has, you know, gotten hit in the saw and things got a big chunk out of it, but it technically still spins. But a drill bit. I mean, people break drill bits all the time. You know, that's broken. It's kind of hard.
- [37:21]
Matt
Yeah. Drill bits are typically way harder. Liam's kind of touching on that. So one mishit will just snap it. The other thing to note is I think drill bots kind of get memed on because they're really hard to execute and kill with. But I think there's actually a small thing that people forget, which is people underestimate them. For example, the power of friendship fire. Did you know that person had top armor?
- [37:46]
Liam
Yeah.
- [37:47]
Matt
And you know what they said? Oh, it's a drill, but I don't need to run it. You know what he happened? Yeah, he caught fire. Where if you fight a saw or a hammer saw, you're putting that top hammer on instantly. So it is something that people underestimate, and I actually think that is an advantage is people underestimate the drill. The other thing that can be funny that I've heard has happened or been close to happening is every robot in smaller weight classes at least have a fun little, like, switch hole. And I've heard, in sync cotto, a Couple of times get very close to drilling through your power switch. And I'm not saying that would happen, but I'm not saying it won't. And that's something that per se, a Hammersaw sawbot might actually struggle to do. I am talking about a one in a million thing, but it isn't as doomed as it sounds. But I think crushers do it better, surprisingly, compared to a drill bot. If you were going to pick one of the two, and I think, Brandon, you might have a little better talking about that, because I know Fracas is a lifter, but it's still kind of a similar concept.
- [38:50]
Liam
Yeah, yeah.
- [38:50]
Matt
In terms of grabbing somebody with something to like.
- [38:53]
Liam
It's something I've thought about for a while. Many others have done it. So Fracas is primarily a lifter suplexer with the. The upper jaw being able to grab into the opponent. It's very similar to Claw Viper. Red Storm sort of was a greedy snake. Other lifter robots sort of like it in there. The whole premise is that you want to get the opponent onto your jaws and be able to control them for really, like crushers. Probably the best two robots seen in the old times is Razor from Robot wars and then Spectre. Excuse me. Specter Slash. What's the other one? It was very cool. It was on BattleBots. Its name eludes me at this very
- [39:34]
Brandon
moment, but I'm sure the one with the. The Dynam. Yeah.
- [39:37]
Liam
Quantum. There we go. Spectre and Quantum. So both from the same family, of course, Same teen robo challenge, who were phenomenal machinists. But in their case, the emphasis is that the bottom jaw is inactive. It's totally the upper jaw. So many lifters love a bottom jaw that also lifts the whole opponent. Crushers fully intend to squish you like a vice on their own chassis. It's kind of like an otter, how they like break like open shells and clams on their chests, which is crazy, but they do that. And then in this case, the robot's chassis ends up becoming like a. A press where you now have the upper robot head squishing down onto the chassis. Where in this case, the opponents between the jaw and the chassis and the ground supporting the chassis. So that way it doesn't just press itself in. Into the in dirt. But the main idea is that you're trying to cut in by hitting essentially through the top plate, similar to hammer saws, to hit very valuable pieces. The main difference, though, is that these crushers are focusing tons of force, tons of force. So like Doll you viewers at home, if you're trying to get through a, let's see, 8th inch aluminum plate, find that a hardware store like mild steel plate. Try to take like a pencil or like a pen that has pens like harder. Try to just like press through a sheet. You cannot do that because metal is very, very strong. And the more you deform it, you actually harden it because now more material is trying to resist against it. So a crusher has to exert literally tons of force at a very sharp point, like a beak or a tooth. And you have to go through the opponent to do so. And the hard part is that you have to engineer something that can take literally tons of force in a very small package. Like the amount of force going through Quantum Inspector is industrial grade. Like, this is the kind of material or kind of energy you'd be using in a machine shop or a manufacturing company to form pieces of large machinery. But this robot is less like, I guess an eighth of a ton in weight and has to do it to something else that has weird shapes. So you can't just say, oh, well, it's perfectly optimal every single time. And you have to really design it to fit all those kinds of things. That being said, the ones that have been made are very beautiful. Razor, Spectre and Quantum are phenomenal machines, but they really demand sort of the utmost level of design integrity and machining capability in order to really hone them. But the benefit is that in theory, when you're able to do it, they can kill just about anything in front of them because their level of power is the highest you could possibly get of consistent force onto something. But that also means that you have to now figure out the weight for it, because now that your robot is essentially a manufacturing, like industrial grade press being put into a fighting robot box, you somehow have to design it to not get instantly splattered against the wall by something that spins very, very quickly, like a vertical horizontal spinner or a hammer saw, which can reach over and hit your hydraulic press. And that kind of concern of armor really lends itself to the biggest weight classes because of physics versus the small robot classes where drill bots kind of are attempting to be similar. Hammer saws are kind of like an instantaneous spark of that, and saws are very close relatives of it. But just because the physics work out, crushers have a very hard time trying to do it. But if you are able to do it, kudos to you. You're pretty awesome. But you also are really trying to deal with a very high Stakes armor situation. Even if your power is theoretically enough to handle almost all machines, like a average insect to featherweight robot, only at maximum has some layers of steel in it. And if your robot is able to exert enough, enough force, probably like 3 tons or yeah, at least 3 tons of force over a very, very tiny area to create high pressure on that one point and able to pierce the steel, you could probably kill anything in front of it. That being said, unsticks are a different story. I really pity the poor cage manager who has to bring out the crowbar. I tried to pry apart a fused steel tooth into your chassis, or better yet, the inevitable fire that might happen if it picks apart where your battery is. But they're very impressive control bots and they're sort of like the most dangerous when done correctly machines, but very hard to execute correctly and nearly impossible to do. So that's why only a handful in the world ever existed. Even less of them successful.
- [44:24]
Matt
Yeah, I would say crushers are the lowest. Like there's probably four people I can count where every other weight class I could say at least other type, at least both my hands. The other thing Brandon pointed out, it's most complex because typically they use hydraulics, which are not as much great resources in our community for that and take up a lot of space and weight. So that's why big bots can do it. Where little bots usually you can't get a valve smaller than what you're using on a big bot. Hypothetically.
- [44:51]
Liam
Yeah, the force is still equal out. So it really makes no sense to make like a very tiny little regulator if the industrial grades, like you actually need £2,000 anyway to do anything anyways. So once again, big bot's better. Small bot, little harder for it.
- [45:06]
Brian
I mean, I think, I think one of the things that I'll keep it quick that articulating, you know, arms and mechanisms have brought to the sport is like really contrarian robots. Like we talked about, you know, attaching drills, attaching saws. One of the ones that stood out to me when we started talking about like the anomalies in this class was boobster. But as soon as I saw boobster, I was like, wait, wait, so now we're hitting from the bottom with a hand. I'm like, where does this end? Like, we're attacking from everywhere. Like you can't protect everything. But that's, that's kind of the beauty of articulating arms, you know, as you put saws on the outside. You can hug somebody with two hub Mod, it doesn't really end. So you can get as creative as you want. But like Brandon said, keeping the weight in mind. Right. So like some of those really, really outside the box things happen more in like a 12 or a 30 because you have the weight to put into the armor that you need to kind of protect the robot and the weapon systems that you're going to need to accomplish it. But yeah, Boob Surface just stood out to me. As soon as we started talking about this, I was like, I saw that and thought, that's a pretty amazing robot to be able to build and actually have it function appropriately.
- [46:07]
Christine
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, we are going to move on to verts. And there's people say verts, but there's a lot of different types of verts out there. So just to highlight, kind of on my list, you have big verts like synthesis and phenomenon. You have big wheel verts like huge and Little man and every other huge style bot that exists. Drisks like Sir Slicey and sad. Octopus drums like Minotaur and Jet lag, full body drums like B roll, a noob tube. Then you have beater bars. Trick or beater shredded, bro. A couple of those. And then egg beaters. Because again, one of those confusion things I think most people consider beater bars. The longer beater and egg beaters are, the more compact beater like what Glitch or, or Black Dragon have. So that's a lot of different types of robots. So whoever wants to kind of start. It's. It's quite a, quite a gamut there.
- [47:14]
Brian
I mean, every, every robot's a vert. If you turn it in the right direction in the arena at some point.
- [47:19]
Liam
You know, it's same for horizontals.
- [47:22]
Matt
There is a really fun vertical point. There's a really fun picture with nine pictures where it's literally everything is a drum horizontal. Oh yeah, syndrome that's off axis. But back to that, I think Brian, you with your son tj, you could talk a little bit about some drums because you probably have a lot of help helping him out with that and hearing him soundboard on those things.
- [47:45]
Brandon
Yeah.
- [47:45]
Brian
So, I mean, mothership is. Well, mothership started as Dr. Drumstick, which was an ant. It was just a fingertech beater bar that we use two wheel drive. And the, the beauty of the two wheel drive beater bar is, you know, you can kind of turn on a dime in a sense. But it does suffer from, you know, making straight runs across the arena because it doesn't have the length that say A four wheel drive beater bar may have to kind of shoot from one side of the arena over the other. An attack, it's, it needs a little bit more control. He always tends to drive it a little bit slower. Same thing with mothership. Mothership's a little bit better. But in his case, for those that don't know, he, he does what he, he calls a cursed weapon system because his weapon motor is mounted in the back of the robot and the belt actually goes over his drive motors as opposed to where most beaters, they will have a drive motor up in the front and it's belted to the weapon and the drive motors are towards the rear, the center of the robot. In a two wheel drive, he tends to have, you know, he wanted to put the motor in the back so that way he could keep the center of mass as close as he possibly could to maximize his drivability, which, I mean, in his own right, he's a very respectable driver. So he, that's. I think he's served him well. I, I don't want to let go of too much, but I was told recently that by the end of this year that robot's either going to be winning or shelved. So I think he's starting to shift more towards the, I don't want to say the dark side, you know, but like the meta that has been in existence for the last, you know, four or five years. So there may be a mothership with four wheels in the, in the future at some point.
- [49:23]
Liam
Nice.
- [49:24]
Brandon
Yeah, there's just so many different types of verts, it's hard to categorize them all. But the way that I see it is like, okay, like, do you want to. Are we playing the fork ground game or are we not? Or how much of it is, is there? Because, you know, when it comes to like smaller sized verts, it's like, okay, how wide are we making the weapon? The wider you make the weapon, the less I see the ground game comes into play. So whenever you're. The big advantage of like a wide beater bar is the fact that, you know, the beater bar is so wide it gets to hit this massive area on the ground. So like, you know, if you watch Poind Victus a lot of the time, sometimes the opponents will run forks and he just, you know, doesn't care. He'll just eat up the forks on the ground if you can bite them. Now there's like different things you can do to get around that, but the other way, like the other type of ground Game is like, you know, are we going reach vert? And that's what you see in a lot of the big classes. Sometimes it's like, oh, if I can just reach over and hit your chassis, then maybe the forks aren't as big of a deal, but I don't know. Brandon, would you like to talk about the ground game?
- [50:34]
Liam
Yeah.
- [50:35]
Brandon
The ground game is a very big and complicated aspect of the verts.
- [50:39]
Liam
Yeah. Yeah. I've on my blog team on the dot com, been doing writeups for the. For the lifetime of Phenomenon and even the my lefter fracas. About the ground game, there's a lot of big emphasis on how you approach the opponent. Fundamentally, the way you're thinking about it is the robots will meet at some point in the box, which is the whole point of combat, and you want to control how they interact. In some ways, you want a more controlled way of interacting. So in many cases, you have lots of forks. Famously, Endgame and BattleBots World Championship 7 had this massive array of very small wedge lets as well as very long forks. The whole idea being that no matter how you approach endgame, he's shaping you a certain direction. So you want to think about it. If you're approaching Endgame or any sort of vert with lots of nautic forks like Phenomenon, the goal is to tilt you up so that way you can capture the bottom on a big uppercut hit. Because I want to be able to have you above me. So that means my weapon spins around, I can get on, I can get under you, throw you upwards. I brace against the ground while you're launching into the air. And that gives me a lot of benefit because I can tumble you and juggle you. That also means that you have to do lots of ways of interacting to do so, because you always want to tilt them up. That's where a lot of tower verts and beater bars have this additional potential of, like, I could try to reach over you and hit it, like Liam was saying. So, for example, Synthesis 30 and Robot Rampage famously only had like two very, very long outriggers. And the February event in March, there was like four or five different tower verts that were all fighting each other with identical setups. It's like myself, Gordon Fish and Quack, like four verts that are just clones of each other, and I was the smallest of them. So first of all, I felt bad because now I was being Outreach for everybody else. But that was the entire point. Whenever I approached the taller verts, they simply hit Phenomenon's Chassis first tilted it up. And so when I continue to go towards them, I'm already halfway angled into the air, so they would just uppercut me into the air. For bots like Emulsifier Synthesis that don't have as much of that, the whole idea is I want to have some level of be able to control you to a long outwards outriggers, sort of giving you a kill zone box to start following you into it. But you're really just trying to hit the chassis first. And when you have an absurdly big weapon, your main point is that you're trying to just hit something, because in theory, even if the forks can't reach you, but the weapon reaches you, the weapon has all this energy. You could hit their frame rail, you could hit their pulleys and cut the belts, you could even hit a wheel and just crumple the whole drive side and limit them. So then you are eliminating ground game as a factor entirely. Bots like Huge and other big wheels do the exact same thing, just even greater level, because they're entirely designed to just skip any sort of ground interaction and purely hitting your face. The downside of that is the gyro, the hugest generally are able to get around that because they have this very, very wide stature to go with it because of the very narrow body. But in bots like Synthesis and Emulsifier, if you see them turning, they will always lift up on one side because they have to account for the gyro. So in my case, phenomenon is much smaller blade. The intention that phenomenon has less excess energy, so it can control itself. Gore was probably the best example of this in February, as his blade was very, very light and not the biggest, but it had all this beautiful control, so it could just get around you. And even in those cases, is fork still controlled you. That being said, as others mentioned before, beater bars are fantastic at eating forks. So now, if you're a vert with all this ground game, your method of control is I want a very, very strong fork to slow down the beater bar or a drum. I want them to bounce off of the fork and slow down because of all that energy being wasted trying to grind against it. So by the time I get to hit them, I just crack the blade or crack the beater bar and I could potentially throw them up in the air or even break the weapon because of all the weird geometry with it. So it creates a lot of thought. You have to sort of plan out every little micro interaction with how your robot's approaching the Other robot with ground game, which can also make it insane, because you can have the most brilliant ideas for ground game. And the floor is just uneven and just doesn't matter. And you're like, man, I'm depressed. Because then they just tilt. Like you just bounce up at the wrong moment or you get caught in the floor and you get stuck temporarily. The robot just slides behind you and hits the side and just tears you up and you feel really, really bad. And that's just the cruel nature of ground game. I imagine robots with like steel floors, like very brand new steel floors, have the benefit sometimes, but because combat is combat, it's never perfect. So you always have this variability of wine to really control everything, but ultimately still having to play that variable. And that's sort of the strength of more chaotic designs. But it does vary because sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Live by the fork, die by the fork.
- [55:47]
Brandon
That's why you gotta shift the hoof meta. The hoof meta. Yeah, I can talk about the hoof. So I've been working on the. The hoof meta a little bit, but there's this one variation of forks. You've probably seen them on Emulsifier. But the idea being that we want to have this big contact patch to be able to glide over the floor, but we don't want to, like, we know we don't want to get stuck on the floor. We want to have our cake and eat it too. So a lot of people are starting to invest in this hoof where basically you have some sort of hinging arms to the fork and then you have the tip of the fork is able to independently rotate. So that way, whenever, you know, you're going over rough terrain, there is a large contact patch that doesn't just dig directly down into the floor, like it kind of wants to glide over. And the other thing, I don't know how much of a big deal this is with the verts, but like, whenever you gyro the hoof, whenever you gyro and your fork, I feel like the hook can kind of stay somewhat. Yeah, there's.
- [56:58]
Liam
But yeah, there's more force at the tip that wants to resist lifting. So that sort of allows it to pivot some.
- [57:04]
Brandon
Yeah, yeah, that's the. The huff. Yeah.
- [57:09]
Matt
So speaking of ground game, there is one that Brandon touched on that says, what's ground game? I don't know what that is. Huges, they're known as big wheels. Usually they're a large spinning disc in the center of a robot with two giant wheels. There are Also, two exceptions to this, but we don't really go into them too much, which are big wheels with horizontals. Demi Gorgon was at that one point. That and also one bow existed. Huges are like, what if people played ground game and I just didn't. And their entire intent is to hit you without you hitting them. So by being bigger or taller, if you fight some small disc vert, all they can do is hit your wheels while you're just hitting them. Prime every time with your blade. Every hit is a good hit. If they can't hit you and you can hit them in weird ways, damage top plates, hit weapon nuts. I've done that like three times with my Beetle. It's really funny when I get someone saying, I can't take my weapon off. Why did you hit my nut? But typically, they thrive on chaos. And in exchange for being tall and big, they're unable to do anything else. If a big wheel loses its weapon, it just says, I guess I lose. Because it has no traction. Typically, it can't really control. They don't run forks, so they can't get under people. But they play the extreme of the reach game, as Brandon kind of put it, where they just want to outreach everyone in every plane. Meaning, I don't want to get hit, period. I'm hitting you. You don't get to touch me. And that's one of their main advantages. But now people have started to evolve to make special configs with thinner, smaller blades or taller blades so that it can hit the body and it is less advantageous because then you go back to the who hits who first.
- [58:55]
Brandon
Yeah.
- [58:55]
Liam
Now it's a reach war. Now, instead of the forks trying to hit each other, it's the blade hurting each other. So it's even higher gambling.
- [59:01]
Brandon
So, yeah, I feel like in, like every sort of combat robots, like we just talked about, like, you know, a bunch of more complicated, ish styles of combat robots. But I feel like every single matchup period has some aspect of. It's either ground game or reach war or both. Like, you know, verts, horizontals. Like, this is a big aspect of combat robotics that, you know, you need to pay attention to or, you know, pay mine to. So it's like, are you going to win the ground game or are you going to win the reach war? It's like, you got to win one of them.
- [59:38]
Brian
Yeah. So that's something that I. I took when I. I don't know how many people know, but I know Peter Repeater Robotics is coming out with Antweight hub motor bar. So it takes his 2207s and is he's got a custom hub motor. So I was able to beta test that and I had been wanting for a long time to just take Peter's mini bot that he had made and I said just throw a beater bar on it. So that's what I did. And like, so that's where like. So this is actually Beater Griffin but it's effectively just the repeat mini with a beater bar in it and it's run on brushed. I threw it to death together in like a week. And but, but to your point, when you have the ability to get you know, robot up on those forks and then you've got a big contact patch for your weapon, like you can do quite a bit of damage because it gives you a lot of area to hit and there's not a whole lot they can do once they come up there because they're either going to, you going to kick up or they're going to get stuck or get turned on those forks. So once you get them up there it's, it's very difficult. Now with that said being a TPU forks, if someone catches one of those and it starts to flop up, I'm pretty much dead in the water for the rest of the match. So I, I think you know, to your point though that forks are definitely. There's a lot of very specific and niche design choices that I've seen recently like with repeater and the way that they've kind of designed and you know they'll, they'll file down or grind down the edges of their forks to you know, remove some of that, that hard contact patch there and that sharp edge. For beaters I did the same thing and I've, I've found that center mounted forks actually have worked the best for me for beaters. But a lot of people don't have the geometry that say, you know, some of the more control centric bots, like you know, an SSP or Murphy or some of the other four wheel drive overcutters, undercutters have where you can center amount of fork because it's to me I think that that high angle when it comes in contact with the beater where it's hitting it, it just doesn't have the ability unless that fork kicks up in which case you know you're going to get sent but they just kind of bounce off and they ricochet and you can, you can get control of them having that, that higher, that higher fork and that that steeper angle, it's just no, no proof of concept, no science behind it. I don't have the, the engineering explanation for it, but I mean, personal experience, I've, I've noticed that having those center mounted forks against beaters is definitely a game changer.
- [61:57]
Christine
Yeah, for sure. Well, we've got two more primary categories of archetypes to talk about and then one what I call the secondary category because I wouldn't consider them the main archetype, but it's a feature that can be added to multiple archetypes. So the next thing we're going to talk about is horizontals. And so you have of course mid cutters like you would think of your tombstone or Caldera. You have undercutters of course, like Valkyrie and Buzzkill. You have overheads like Bloodsport or Kratos. And then the Thagomizer style robot like Maximizer or the Throngler is another robot that is of that type. So Liam's probably a good person to start this because of Buzz Kill.
- [62:46]
Brandon
Yeah. So I guess we're just talking about, okay, how do I avoid playing the ground game and play Reach wars instead? So that's basically kind of what horizontals do. Like, you know, a lot of people design verts to like be like, oh, like their default config is, okay, I'm going to fight verts. But horizontals can oftentimes be a big curveball. Like another thing that you got to think about just because fundamentally they, they. It's basically fighting horizontal. It's like a big vibe check. Right. Like, do you. Did you put thought into having a big wedge in order to like prepare for them? So when it comes to all horizontals, you're basically just having this massive death area in front of you. So you kind of get to take a lot of the like precision out of it. You could kind of like skate by like with a lot of verts. It's a lot of just driving straight towards them. With a horizontal, you can kind of like just skate by them. So the, the big aspect of horizontals when it comes to verts is like how you drive them. So verts are very like, you know, point and shoot, like dart and dash and stuff like that. Horizontals, you're actually able to drive them much more fluidly because of the gyro. Because the gyro is in like a different aspect like, or a different axis. That's what I'm going to say. You can kind of drive way more fluidly and you can kind of see that I definitely Try to take advantage of driving well in buzz kill. Just basically being more agile to like in order to get around your opponent. But whenever you're fighting an opponent, it's if they have a wedge, that's when things become more difficult. If they don't have a wedge, then things are a bit easier. So when it comes to horror, like mid cutters, I would definitely think of mid cutters as more of like a glass cannon type. Even to a, like a very good robot, any good robot fighting a mid cutter. A mid cutter is definitely a wild card because they. Mid cutters often just take want large diameters. They're basically playing the reach war, kind of similar to verts. Horizontals can also play ground game and reach for horizontals. Basically they want to. Mid cutters want to be a big diameter. They want to be able to get a big bite and basically outreach. You hit the side if they. If a horizontal goes like front on front with a vert and it's not going to end well, but you want to hook to the side. The big benefit to why mid cutters are just potentially so deadly is because the blade is probably going to be around the same height as the cg, which means that they're able to, that's hard to explain. Kind of like get a better impact on it. Or like with an undercutter, sometimes you can kind of cut under. You cut under and they kind of like pop up a little bit. With a mid cutter, you can get a massive hit on like the juicy bits like hitting into the side and hitting into the wheels and such. But the problem with the mid cutter is, like I said, it kind of puts the weapon at like the perfect height to get smacked by a vert. So if you're not cautious about it and they say your opponent's patient and they get a good lineup on the mid cutter, things could potentially not, you know, go well because you're just going to get smacked. Undercutters basically solve that issue by making the weapon as low as possible. You know, with a vert, the weapons like this, your horizontal is here, you know it's going to get smacked. But if you bring the horizontal all the way down to here. Now, this is a lot. If you're able to get much further into their robot before their weapon starts to hit you. And if they don't have a wedge, you can usually cut under their vert before they even get the chance to hit you. So like if I'm fighting an opponent like as an undercutter, and there is, there isn't a wedge, like, okay, I know that I can play this way more aggressively and hit them because they're probably not gonna. If I get a good bite, you know, they're not going to be able to hook under my. My undercutter. The problem though, is with wedges. Undercutters, I feel like, have a somewhat of a harder time dealing with wedges because the. If they have a really good wedge, the undercutter will hit the wedge much sooner, meaning that before they go weapon on weapon, the wedge basically slows down the weapon. So the weapon is going to be spinning a lot slower, meaning that you're probably going to lose the weapon on weapon. And that's what happens when you see undercutters get roofed. I definitely had that happen a lot. But, you know, the general goal of the undercutter is to be an unkillable machine. I generally see like, like I said that mid cutters are much more of a glass cannon. Undercutters are, honestly, I feel like, are much more agile. Defensive machines like it. Like the mid cutter, you're just trying to go in, get a good bite on the weapon stack. But with an undercutter, you need to be a lot more tactical in order to pick your shots and be much more patient because it's just harder to win the weapon on weapon with a wedge. So going into, like, overheads, overheads are kind of struggle a little bit. So I mentioned that one of the weaknesses of mid cutters is the fact that, you know, their weapon is right here and like the perfect smacking range. So notoriously, undercutters, whenever they get inverted, it's like, oh, that's the, that's the bad side of the coin. You don't want to be there because the weapon is much higher. Meaning that like, mid cutters are in like a can sometimes get nicely smacked by a vert. An inverted undercutter. Now your weapon's all the way up here. Like, you might not even be able to hit their robot, and they're just going to be able to whack the undercutter. And it's very often happens where that's where a lot of undercutters get de weaponed. So when you're designing a robot to be like, intentionally a overhead, I feel like you have. You have to put a lot more consideration into, okay, how do I not get my weapon taken off you also? So some of that is being making it lower. So you'll. If you see a lot of like, overheads, they're as very, very flat, as flat as Possible, like, if you look at bloodsport, like, that is a very flat robot. But yeah, Phantom 4 is another one, right? Yes, yeah.
- [69:39]
Liam
Yes.
- [69:40]
Brandon
To be fair, to get the weapon as low as possible, because the thing with the overhead is you can kind of, you can put the weapon all around the robot lot, so it's kind of like fully covering it, but it's, It's a more challenging design. I'd say that, like, deceptively there's more things that you have to accomplish. And then in thagamizers, okay, so thagomizers are kind of like, honestly, like a mutually exclusive thing that like, like a thagomizer could be a mid cutter or an undercutter or an overhead. But thagomizers, okay, so normally like regular horizontals, they just have to drive forward in order to get a big bite. You know, I think I said this earlier. Your bite, your weapon stores up energy. But you. That energy is only going to be as useful as much as you can transfer. So if you can't transfer that energy, it's not going to be very useful. So thagomizers basically solve the problem by instead of driving towards the opponent, they can present a defensive front, like forks to counter the wedge, and then they can swing in order to get that bite. Basically, they get the bite from a. A stationary position so they don't have to, like, you can be a lot more patient with them. You're basically a thomiser. I. So, okay, so I made a thagomizer for a bit and a lot of it is like, like field control. Like, as if watching, like being a thagomizer, you're like, okay, like, I'm owning this space and it's up to them to now try to get around me. And it kind of flips the script because a lot of the times, like with the undercutter, like I mentioned, you have to be a lot more tactical. It's like, okay, the vert is like taking the center of the. The arena. They're like an advantage. And I have to try to get around them with antagomizer. With a. You're kind of flipping the strip. Now they have the pressure to get on you, to get around you because you have forks and forks counter the wedge. Wedge counter is the horizontal. Forks counter the wedge. So and maneuvering as a vert, getting around the horizontal is also much harder because they have to deal with gyro, whereas the horizontal does not. So that's why the design is. That's why maximizer has been able to do it. So well, the hard part of the design, they're deceptively there. There's a hard part. They have way. They require way more of the drive, way more than you think they would in order to accelerate to, like, in a very fast speed where you're not just like, oh, I'm turning around to swing. Like, the drive needs to be bulky, not just the motor. In order to have the power to do that, you need to have the traction. So either if you're running on steel, fours, magnets, or very, you know, good cleats and the gearbox as well. Like, think about it like you're going from nothing, maybe they're even on your forks, to needing to whip around and hit them. So if you look at, like, maximizers, like gearbox, if. If you ever get a chance to see it, it's. It's substantial because, you know, just all that torque at once likes to crack gears. I know that running my Beetle Zenith, this is definitely an aspect that I underestimated. I broke a lot of gearboxes from just going from still to trying to swing around. And it's kind of a game of like, okay, you could not run cleats, but now you're not going to be able to accelerate as much. So it's something that you just have to make sure that you consider with dagomizers. One more thing that I want to mention between all of these is the recent development of forked undercutters. So, yes, thank you. Yeah.
- [73:46]
Liam
Ground game returns.
- [73:47]
Brandon
We. So basically, you know, for a long time, us horizontals are sick and tired of being oppressed by the verts with big wedges. You know, we can take on the verts that, you know, don't have the time or the weight to do a wedge, but the ones that do have a wedge, it's like, oh, my God, I get hard countered. I lose. I've lost a prom header so many times. I remember I got absolutely clipped by Anthus Baina at the championship in 24. It's so forked undercutters, basically, we're like, hey, bagamizers. We see that you guys got these nice forks in order to deal with the wedge. What if we had that, too? So now, instead of putting the forks on the opposite side of the robot, what if we put the forks on the front of the robot with the weapon? So the general idea is that you're basically presenting a defensive and offensive front at the same time. So what happens a lot, and this is something that I didn't predict happening, but I remember when I first and I know you can potentially talk about your experiences as well, Brian, but when I first made my Beetle Zenith, which originally was a thagomizer, and then I converted it into just a regular forked undercutter by having the forks and the weapon in front, it basically allows you to get under the wedge, prop the wedge up and then the wedge can just fall onto the weapon and get an insane bite on it. So yeah. Have you had similar experiences, Brian?
- [75:25]
Brian
So yeah, this is the one area where I feel like I can actually speak from experience in some sense of knowledge. But to your point, something I wanted to bring up earlier too is the four wheel drive undercutters. They give you a lot of opportunity to, at least from my experience, to armor up and make a robot that is as durable as possible. Coming from someone that created control bots. You know, for the first year I didn't really do any active weapons. The first thing that I transitioned to was an ant weight that was an undercutter, just 28, 22, you know, typical ant weight with two forks. And to your point, yes, absolutely. The forks are a game changer when it comes to people needing to accommodate what you're actually presenting. Because the idea is, oh, I'll throw a wedge at you. Well, I can't throw a wedge at you because you've got forks are going under my wedge. Okay, well I'll try wedgeless wedge. Lets work. If you can get to my weapon before my forks get to you. And typically forks are longer than wedge. Let's. So you can also win that battle with, you know, the, the one thing that I think, I think or style that I've always feared is the, you know, more compact wedges like Comet like that's one of those things that they're, they're so compact and you know, so long and skinny that they, they have the ability to on a straight line, get in between the forks and make contact. In which case you lose that like you mentioned earlier, you lose that, that impact because you're going up and then just going to the roof.
- [76:58]
Brandon
Yeah, it's kind of a weird aspect because normally with an undercutter, like an undercutter is like just a plain undercutter is better against the narrow wedge, but against a forked undercutter, the narrow wedge is kind of better.
- [77:11]
Brian
So because it, it takes away the ability that you have of the forks to actually do their job because you can turn into them. But on a lot of cases if you're lining up, they're going to come straight across the arena the, the one thing I'm, I toyed with a little bit at G Scroll probably six months ago was the TPU forks. So instead of actually doing, you know, the metal forks, I went to the TPU forks just to see kind of what that, what, what that would do. And right now I think there's two primary styles of four wheel drive undercutters. One is, I would say like the more common and more popular is chaos blitz, you know, like guarding the two front wheels. You're typically belting from one motor to the other wheel. So you got two, two drive belts and you're, you know, they have a more of a buzzkill shaped nose. So you're actually leading with the weapon in a lot of cases, right? You still have the forks, but you have a much larger contact patch on the weapon. And there's what I would consider like myself because even when I described Murphy's Law, it's a control bot disguised as an undercutter. And for me it's more, I have a full, at the time when I qualified in June, it was a 3 millimeter AR500 wedge quarter inch forks and you know, didn't have a ton of reach because it was a hub motor. So for me a lot of those fights were about just surviving. And I think that's, that's what this, I don't call it meta, but that's what this style of robot allows is you can play the control game and protect your weapon system and take the shots as you need them, right? You get them in a corner, you back up, you come around, try to get them from behind, take a tire, you know, get to the back of the robot. So I, I think it's, it's a very difficult robot for a lot of people to counter because you have so many opportunities. Like I said, I can run center mounted forks, I can run forks that are low to the ground, I can run TPU forks. You can even do what I've considered recently is running one fork or running a steel fork on the exit side of the weapon and then a TPU fork on the other side. Because then if it's a beater, I can throw my fork, the metal fork into the weapon. But on the side of the weapon spinning to the contact side, I have a really low fork that's lower than the weapon. So if you come that way, I pick you up. Well now the weapon's going to come straight into your wedge because you're sitting like this, right? Whereas if you have two forks, you're typically above the weapon so I can drive you into the wall, but I'm not going to make that contact. So.
- [79:36]
Brandon
Yeah, yeah, that's. That's also something that I'm, I'm actively looking into whether or not I need to run both fork. So I've, I've run. I've got a config for Buzz Kill with either two forks with a smaller weapon or the full size weapon with a single fork. Because, like, I was very inspired after seeing Cold Snap at the championship where he just had one fork and basically, you know, he had the defensive side of the robot and the offensive side of the robot. And then like you said, like, you only really need one fork because once they get under the fork, you know, they're at an angle and you can hook under it and then the other side of the robot is still open. So that's, that's what I'm going to be looking into from now on. But yeah, this is definitely a very evolving archetype. I mean, they're still undercutters. A very arc. A modern config, a modern challenge that a lot of other robots have to deal with. Yeah.
- [80:30]
Brian
And for anybody watching that is wanting to build one, the fork goes on the opposite side, the weapon is spinning. 2 weapon goes this way, forks over here. Just clarification.
- [80:42]
Brandon
Yeah. Because the, like, the way that I see it, like generally as an undercutter, it's like you have the side of the weapon with the robot coming out, like out, and then the side looking around and it's like generally the side with the weapon coming out is much less useful. Even though it's like punching out. Like as an undercutter, you want to hook around, you want to hook around the weapon, you want to hook around the wheel. So basically having a single fork, the idea is it just takes the less useful side of the weapon and turns it into a very critical tool that you can use. Like, like you don't have to use it all the time, but it's there if you want to shift into that, you know, mindset.
- [81:21]
Brian
Yeah. Because it lifts them up and then even if you move out of the way, it drops them down. And then when it drops them, it provides a, an edge for that blade to catch. So like I said, I think it's. Is it the style that I have, like I front load the entire armor. It's wedge and full fork. So it's kind of. What do you do in that scenario where you're facing a control bot that just happens to have a weapon?
- [81:42]
Liam
It's.
- [81:42]
Brandon
Yeah.
- [81:43]
Liam
So but actually another I guess question for you too, since you're the horizontal and Manomat has as well. I know you got your horizontals, so in the case as well. A big issue verts have is generally your vert is one position. You're about your front horizontals have the benefit generally they are also one side, but you can pivot very, very well. Multi bot battle for vert is terrible. Kaza has been showing us that for the past year. So how would you guys in your experiences really felt the difference of like a horizontal multi battle, I don't know against minor mine plus one £12 or other beetle weights like repeater. How's that experience been? Because I have not had to do it yet and the big ones done it in the ant way. It's not in the big ones for multi bot battles with verts. But I've hated it because I know it's going to happen. I don't want to get bullied.
- [82:31]
Brandon
So I generally feel like the multi bot matchup for horizontals, any horizontal is favorable for the horizontal. So when back when we were talking about like the shell spinners and stuff like that, I kind of, I think I mentioned that horizontals are. They want to be heavier in order to like not spin. But that's actually an aspect of like all most horizontals, like horizontals benefit from being heavier than their opponent because verts, you know, whenever they hit they, you know, are braced against the ground so they can much more easily transfer a lot more of that energy and they stay planted. But horizontals, you know, when you're hitting to the side, there's you know, kickback to it. So the only thing resisting the kickback is your weight and momentum that you have with the robust. So with when you're fighting a lighter robot, like you're basically able to hit them and they go flying and you're able to stay much more planted and you're able to transfer a lot more of that energy just because you're, you're bigger and heavier. So I think the, the hard thing that you just need to think about or just you know, be consider in the matches, you just don't want to get cornered because sometimes horizontals can have a not great disadvantage state. Like if say if you go flying and you're against the wall and you need to spin back up, usually spend up time on horizontals is a bit slower than verts. If you lose a lot of momentum then and they're a really good like well coordinated multibot, then it can sometimes Be hard. But if you can, you know, get a massive hit on one of them and cripple them as a horizontal, as a heavier horizontal is heavier than them, then that's usually the way to go.
- [84:19]
Brian
Yeah, the, the two fights that I've had have been against Gulo Gulo and then Scrambled Eggs. The scrambled eggs was a wpi. I believe it's a vert in a beater and then Kulo Gulo was, was you know, minimize SSP with their you know, two wheel drive undercutter in to your point as a four wheel drive undercutter specifically like your ability to control and drive is your biggest advantage. So against, against a multi like you need to control the fight, pick your shots, do not like pin somebody and then just watch the other robot come across the arena. Like you've got to take your shot back up, go to the other one. Like you have to be very strategic in the way that you approach that fight. And I think, I mean really that goes with any undercutter or horizontal for that matter. But specifically if you've got four wheels and the ability to drive, you know that well if you've got a good drive platform you have to use that to your advantage when you're fighting a, fighting a multi. Yeah but if they have flame then just I don't know like pray or I don't know pick up a religion or you just do something but because there's not a whole lot you can do there.
- [85:24]
Brandon
My bible config so I can start praying.
- [85:28]
Christine
But speaking of control because I, I definitely want to to get into the that the bots that I would say rely more heavily on control. So when we're talking about that we're talking about lifters. So like slam oh shout out to Craig who wasn't able to be here today. Supreme Ruler flippers like Banshee and Blip grabbers like even though I don't think Buffalo wings is quite like classified as a grabber, it is a grabber to be and like wedge bots and fork bots like jelly baby and full court. So talking a bit about that, I know Matt, Matt knows quite a few things about, about those kind of bots.
- [86:14]
Brian
Yeah.
- [86:16]
Matt
So control bots in general are playing two games and depending on your philosophy you play one over the other. Typically control bots play. I am here to survive for three minutes and make you look like an idiot. If I've done that I win. If I don't do that, I lose. There is an alternative one which is koing people but depending upon the arena you fight in and the opponent you fight in. It's not that simple or easy to do. Speaking as a man who had the highest JD not wins per se, highest JD percentage of any three pounder finals in 2024. It was a fun statistic to find out. Not a good statistic, but generally I see control bots as a. If you have like a mission objective as a vert, it's to roof someone. If you're fighting as an undercarriage, your objective is to hit someone and break them. If you're fighting as a hammer saw, your objective is to have a lipo fire control bot, it is just survive pretty much. Control bots strive, value ground game and control and chaos. So if you fight a horizontal, you want them to be ping ponging over the place while you're pushing them into walls and pinning them. If you're fighting a vert, you want to get them on a gyro so you can lift them up and flip them on their heads so they're self riding off the wall. Or you get them caught in in unfavorable position indirectly because of their simpler construction, meaning a lifter, it's easier, it's one motor or a servo or it's more durable, you get more abilities to play configurations. So some control bots have a lot of configs. I have when I used to run half life, I had like four different forks for different opponents, for different sets of reaches, for different characteristics. I had a different wedge, I had a whole different config for fighting other control bots because I just had more weight to play with. And indirectly as a control bot, I value durability. So I put more weight into making things beefier than Avert would. Like Repeater, for example, has these frame rails that are just air. There's nothing. They're glass cannons because they're playing to send someone to the roof. If they don't send you to the roof, they're losing anyway. If they don't do that, they're losing. Where a control bot, if I get sent to the roof and I lose something, I just lose the fight, it's just over. Because my entire effective power is my drive where my lifter is secondary. Meaning being durable, being intelligent and taking advantage of your opponent's dumb mistakes are the best ways to win. I know I'm gonna win a fight when I pin a. I pin a vert and I hear them rev their weapon like an idiot. If you rev your weapon, I know I've won. The mental warfare and you're losing. I can't. I'm Brandon. I'm telling the truth.
- [89:15]
Brian
I know.
- [89:15]
Liam
I also love control bots. It's just like, man, psychological trauma. When you've broken them mentally, you broken the soul, then you break the robot afterwards. It's great.
- [89:23]
Matt
Yeah. So that's the key is control bots aren't playing to typically win by KO they're typically playing to win in the hearts of the judges by showing my opponent not doing anything to me while I'm making them do nothing. And it's that bounce, which is also why they're controversial, because some people don't like watching pins for half of a match. But I almost want to point out, you know, the other guy could just drive better. Four wheel drive, vert. Just drive in a straight line, guys. That's all you got to do, right?
- [89:53]
Liam
That's crazy. He's talented. Even now. Psychological warfare. Even now.
- [89:57]
Matt
I am literally saying every vert driver who complains about a control bot just needs to get better.
- [90:05]
Brian
I mean, there's, there's a point to be made there. You know, it's like when you think about cam lifters. Well, I mean, they're 12, you know, 10, 12 inches long. If you get there, just turn sideways and just hit the cam lifter. It's. Or you'll hit the fork. But I mean, obviously that, that assumes you have the, the forks and the ground game to do so.
- [90:24]
Matt
And generally people, when people call something OP like Jelly Baby or Supreme Ruler the year before, they lose. Like, Supreme Ruler went 02 in 2024 at finals. It didn't have a good event. So I think people hyper polarize them in a sense that they're OP because they just need to wedge you. But you got to remember, man, as I've kind of pointed out, one bad exchange, they just lose. You simply need to be better. But one of the main advantages which I didn't touch on is I kind of mentioned it against verts is typically control bots stay planted, they don't use gyro, they just drive, which is a big advantage. So lifters, typically you want to lift someone off the ground or flip them on their head. Grabbers typically want to grab and almost kind of show full control and drive around holding someone or suplex them over their head onto their back. And the idea is just you want to effectively make your opponent not contact the ground. That's the ideal. Forks do that too. If you're a passive wedge bot just pushing someone under a wedge, you get them up, they Suddenly don't have traction with the ground, they can't do anything. Which is why they're important because they act as effectively a skill check for people for ground game or weapon like reliability slash, you know, ground scraping drums. Because ground scraping drums really like eating forks. If you're not perfect for it, you just kind of. You can get bodied by someone with forks. Which jelly baby has made many three pound drivers look silly because they did not have their their brains on or their configs properly configured. I'm literally just taunting every driver.
- [92:05]
Liam
Brandon, you're such a control bot driver right now. It's kind of crazy.
- [92:08]
Matt
For reference, I love the updates to the NHL rule set genuinely. And people who are like, oh, they did the. This is terrible for control bots. It's not. Control bots just need to be better. It's the thing I say for everyone, just be better.
- [92:22]
Brandon
Yeah, I like it because I think Peekaboo can do good now. And I like because Peekaboo didn't go for pins, he went for flipping them in like active flips. So I hope to see Peekaboo that's
- [92:37]
Liam
calling out Bob right now. By the way we are naming him.
- [92:40]
Brandon
Yeah, Bob. I want to see my boy.
- [92:44]
Matt
You even lift, bro.
- [92:46]
Liam
What I will say going off of Matt's point about control bots, I love control bots. They are my favorite one. I came in from background of racing RC cars. So I love being able to control things. I like robots moving very fast and being able to nice swerves and drifts and stuff like that as my best kind of fight. It's part of why horizontals are very, very good. But the downside is that whenever eats you into the air it kind of breaks momentum almost any other robot. Because when you're like hitting the roof, it's like, all right, you've just been sent to the moon and back. How do you feel? You're like not good. Generally that kind of messes you up. So then verts end up becoming interesting dynamic of wanting to be a high speed flipper. But that's a different thing. But as far as control bots like a grabber go, Matt alluded to it earlier at Fracas Fracas suplexing grabber robot. The whole point of that is it's really for humiliation practice. Being like Red storm and like it's ilk is just going to flip you over. All I've done is made you inverted. So if you can drive inverted, you're doing fine. If you can reimburse yourself, even better. But it's the fact that it's the ability to hold you there and to sort of make you think about your life decisions, which really does great amounts of damage. I think people really enjoy it as well as tactically. From a very technical aspect, the more you understand the sport, the more you understand it, because you have to be so perfect in what you're doing really good. Control bot wins actually become master classes for those who really have understanding the technical aspects that do it. The hard part, of course, that it's not always most exciting. People tend to attach other things with it to make it more exciting. So, like Kaza Light has flamethrowers and the flames look very pretty. But I'd argue that the strength of Kazaa is that it's such an unkillable brick that has good ground game, which is why the flame is able to do anything, because people have had flame bots that have just explored immediately and didn't matter at all. But you have a robot that's unkillable and able to pin you and make you look dumb while doing it, because it's doing actual circles around you. Then you feel embarrassed and your robot's been on fire, which just makes you more embarrassed, more panic, and more loss. So Control Bot's the most tactical part of it. It's really why I enjoy those kinds of robots so much, because it demands so much knowledge of the sport and how you want to apply it to do so. That being said, control bots is life, as Matt already said, being on hard mode, something that should be known. The addition of lifters very commonly through the SSP kit, I think is a huge boost. Back in the olden days of the 2000s, 2010s, there was lots of wedges that just were wedges with no lifting ability. They can still obviously exist, but it's not nearly as exciting as being like a little sort of lifting attachment to it to sort of some bit of action. So I do appreciate that. But the ability to have control as an aspect is very critical, I think, to any sort of idea of the sport. I think with all of the parts you've been saying for these robots, they all come down to some level of forethought. If I'm going to aggress my opponent, some lean more into it, some lean more against it. Pure control bots are lower, harder about it. I have an ant, an anti control bot control bot, the great and powerful Catty Wampus, which has itself wronger. It throws itself around instead of trying to just throw the Opponent around. It's. The whole idea is that Caddy Wampus is basically a tank, but instead of having the lifter get underneath of sort of like the conventional forward mounting on the opponent kind of style, it's in the back where it could tilt the robot. And the whole idea is to get the other opponent on top of it so it could throw itself and the other robot. It's kind of crazy because in all the matches I fought with Cattywampus to this point, which have included against like Pine Victus and Marcelino from Brazil. If it can survive with the tail stays behind it, it's great because that means I can tactically bully you with the control forks, which again you can configure as control bots. The downside is that if it gets hit, it's instantly dead. And that's where you get the hard mode gaming on, because you don't. If you don't have the utmost respect for your opponent's ability to damage you, then you're absolutely doomed. But at the same time, they're the most recommended robot for any beginner, because they are what teach you the foundations of any good other machine. It would not matter how big your blade is, vertical or horizontal, if the robots drive immediately quits, because you are instantly punished if your robot's drive dies. Because now you're stuck in a backward circle and everyone's kind of just waiting until the time goes out or in your another arenas go into a pit. But if your drive is excellent and your ability to drive it is even more excellent, then you could destroy just about any kind of machine you're going to fight against. Because now you can inflict your will upon the opponent totally. And the more ability of damage you add to it. So many cases, famously like Jackalope has a lifter and a little vertical spinner. Gwen's ability to get around you and lift is already good because Jackalope doesn't worry about Gyro because it's a very small vert. But guess what? The vert then tosses you up and then it can lift and then it just compounds and compounds and compounds. And so the more you can master that fundamentally with the control bot, the better anything else can be. So it's kind of like like an old proverb I remember being passed around like, I fear not the man who knows a thousand punches. I fear the man who's done one punch a thousand times. Because that is what a control bot is. It is the one primary method. But if you can hone that it is the base that every other method comes off of.
- [98:35]
Christine
Yeah, a hundred percent. And I, I can say like as someone who had a lifter bot as their second bot, it should have been my first bot. It will help you get really good at driving compared to any other robot, because you have to be good at driving when you have a control bot. So that's, that's my take there. For anybody new that's trying to get into the sport, the last thing that I want to touch on is like I said, things that aren't main archetypes but that are, I would call secondary archetypes where you can have any one of. Well, not anyone, but a lot of these different ones we've talked about as part of this type of robot, which would be robots who have unique methods of locomotion such as walkers, shufflers, torque walkers or omni wheeled robots. And then also as a unique type of robot, flowing, throwing flamethrowers into the mix. So those who either have flamethrower as their main weapon or as a secondary weapon. So I just want to touch on that because I think the locomotion is interesting and also the addition of a flamethrower. Although currently I'm pretty sure the only place you can run flames is at nhrl. So it is a pretty limited location for that.
- [99:55]
Matt
Yeah, there are a couple unique places where you can do fire. I could quickly talk about torque walkers because I know Alex picked pretty well and he is a robot called Zane. Torque walkers pretty much have typically two spinning blades. I think there are some weird ones that have others, but the what they do is they spin the blades and then they decelerate and it kind of causes it to walk. Now it's similar to kind of a ring spinner where everywhere is fire, meaning everywhere is danger. You have two spinning blades. If anyone hits you, you're getting hit. And typically they're a lot slower, but in a lot, in most places you get a weight bonus for that, which means they're heavier, which means they can spend more mass and they hit harder. Famously, Droopy has broken like two of Lynx's beaters in the same event because he has a lot of power, because he's heavy and he's just spinning two blades really fast and really heavy. So pretty much torque walkers are rings like you could almost envision it as two overheads that are spinning next to each other and they hurt a lot.
- [101:02]
Brandon
Yeah, I feel like any sort of like NTL horizontal is definitely meta like it like any robot, if there's any robot archetype that you're just gonna slap like some sort of non traditional locomotion on. It's like horizontals definitely benefit the most because, you know, kind of like what we were talking about earlier, just being bigger and heavier as a horizontal is just such a massive benefit. And it's like, you know, when you can put these massive blades with just so much inertia on, they're just. They can just be so devastating. That's why we see so many, like, especially. I mean, I feel like the only weight class I see a lot of 30s and beetle shufflers. Like, you know, you got Silent Spring, Cold Snap. I guess those are shufflers, but then, you know, you got droopy and loopy. Those are also NTL horizontals. There's definitely also like verts that are non traditional locomotion, but I feel like they're. They're much harder to implement. Like, I know that blunder existed. Or Galaxy, we just don't see him in 12.
- [102:15]
Liam
What, like Galaxy and 12?
- [102:16]
Brandon
Oh, yes. In Galaxy and 12. S verts just, I think, like, definitely it's just they get more weight and they're able to hit harder. If you can land a shot even as like a vert, ntl, like, that's a big devastating shot and it's gonna hurt. But horizontals, I feel like, just benefit more from NTL just because, you know, you know, just being heavier and then the verts also have the gyro to deal with. So it seems like the. This mobility nerf on of being in TL or. Sorry, not, I guess for the. The mobility nerf of being a shuffler on ver definitely hurts more. So that's definitely something to consider.
- [103:04]
Liam
There's the multi points you brought up earlier. Now they're sort of like derivative of the other ones.
- [103:11]
Brandon
Oh, yeah.
- [103:12]
Liam
Can you just have like, when you just have multiple robots that you're able to do stuff with, it can get dangerous. Like we're mentioning before, like repeaters want to keep coming to mind. And plusl, because you just have multiple ways, especially if you can do different configurations with it. Honey bombers, as you already know very well, Liam, like, you had horizontal and vertical options.
- [103:33]
Brandon
Yeah.
- [103:33]
Liam
In theory, you could entirely mess up someone's play. Because if you're doing a 1v1 and you know it's a horizontal, you already have an idea if you're a vert. But if you are a vert or a horizontal, but you're playing a vert and a horizontal, it's a bad time I did. Voron did that against polyester in August 2023. I went for Esther first, which is an undercutter, because I knew that if I did not kill the undercutter first, it would tear me apart. And then I fought the drum, but either way, it was a compromising position just because of the nature of my robot. And I was just lucky that I was able to do it. But if you fight two robots, inherently changes how you're gonna have to fight it because many times you're gonna have to think, well, usually I can just do nose to nose, but now the back, the sides, they're also immediately vulnerable as the nose interferes with something else. So, yeah, immediate potential of fear and something that most people hate to drive against.
- [104:31]
Brandon
Yeah, the. Yeah, I feel like the. The best implementation of the horizontal multi. I don't think, like, it's. If you're just gonna do two horizontals, I think it's gonna be kind of rough because, you know, you're gonna be so much lighter than your opponent. But, yeah, I. I remember we fought as honey bombers. We fought Prometta, and he went to. He opted for the wedge. What did you opt for when you fought Polyester? Did you go.
- [105:03]
Liam
I opted for forks, actually, because I'm. My gamble was if I can kill the horizontal faster because it's weaker to giant vert, then I could do a nose to nose against a giant beater. Admittedly, I only had one hit against Esther. It cleaned off the whole forks. But I did kill it because I was uppercutting the horizontal. But when I fought Poly on her side of it, it was just like, all right, big vert bouncing off a drum the whole time. And so that was the expected interaction as it went.
- [105:31]
Brandon
Yeah, I. Although, yeah, I think, though generally, I don't know. So it's like with. When it comes to multi bots, though, it's like with the same archetype. It's like you could either go like the, like the repeater route and be just extremely well coordinated. Like, I don't want to, I guess glass cannons, because, dude, they drive so well together. But I imagine it takes a lot of coordination. And then the other aspect, I guess the other direction you could go is more of a control bot style. I've seen a lot of control bot Maltese, and it's definitely a very good. Because, like, if you think about it, you know, your robot's only eight pounds. So if you have a kinetic weapon that's so much less energy you can put into, you know, the weapon in Order to be effective. But like how much weight does it really take to high center and get a pin on an opponent? Not that much. Just takes. Could just be a little fork. So I think that's why we saw a lot of like multi bot control bots last year. Especially Mako going to.
- [106:38]
Liam
Yeah, yeah. Was it the drum? Oh no, the lifter and the saw. So.
- [106:43]
Brandon
Yeah, yeah, the lifter.
- [106:48]
Liam
Evil Julian shout out.
- [106:51]
Brandon
Yeah. Using the multi bot to kind of tee up the hor. The. The saw, you know. Yeah.
- [106:58]
Liam
If anything, it's one of those like underutilized methods against robots that could really dominate you. Like we didn't mention earlier, but like full court, probably the most dominating control bottom varying especially in 12 pounds because it just completely consumes your ability to do anything. And I've never seen the amount of psychological damage as someone having to fight full court who is not ready for full court. Because it's just three minutes of pure agony of just sitting and waiting, praying for something to happen. It just never comes. Yeah, I've often. Go ahead.
- [107:27]
Brian
I've also, I've often wondered why I mean people haven't tried actually just running verts that are saws against, you know, tpu.
- [107:35]
Liam
Exactly.
- [107:36]
Brian
Spam bots. Because I mean, okay, they pin you, but if they flip you, they're gonna. You risk, you know, getting basically hammersalled. And if they can pick you up, the risk cutting a fork. So I mean, I know it's not. It's pretty contrarian, but it's a pretty viable option, I feel like.
- [107:50]
Liam
No, actually I follow it because I was thinking about when Jake, Jake Maximizer, he brought in boost, he made three pound saw explicitly to cut full court. And that's what he's planning to use at finals last year because he understood that a full court's namely plastic. You just sort of cut at it. I know the issue for at least most vertical spinners is you probably designed like a very thick blade. So it probably takes like a bit more thought of like, oh, I'm taking this weight out for a saw. What else I replace it with? And most people's answer is nothing. And that's just preparation. It's not really down to the design itself, but that is one of those abilities that I see like that, that heavy control, especially TPU base kicking in. But that's where I also think that a multibot is critical against it. Because if you are fighting a robot that just can consume you the way full court does. Yeah, like I would be. I'm not surprised at all. People try to have a specific multi bot config against it as a sub archetype of itself explicitly for that reason.
- [108:49]
Matt
And that kind of goes into all robot archetypes. There are things that are innately good into some things, but bad into others. And there's also less developed aspects that some people haven't thought of yet. So as people think more, you get new counters. Like huge is against four wheel drive verts. They're like, ah, I just lose. Now people are finally figured out, what if I just make a bigger vert? Which sounds really stupid when you say it like that, but it's something that hadn't been done until last year, really becoming modular in that sense. Or you know, full court loses to multi bots. What if I just make my 12 pounder into a nine pounder and put a three pounder in and that pops them up ever so slightly so I can escape or at least he loses control. It's all about development. And constant development means sometimes things we talk about change. Forked undercutters. Great.
- [109:38]
Brandon
It's weird. Sometimes bad matchups can become good matchups. Like you know, with a, an undercutter with forks. You know, if they see that they have a wedge, that's not super ground scraping. Hey, that was a good matchup. Like yeah, there's always room to change.
- [109:55]
Christine
There definitely is. And what. One last question that I want to ask in this last category because it's something that I'm curious personally to get opinions on. I love as a viewer, as a viewer of watching robot fights, I love Omni wheel robots. I think it's just one of the coolest things here. See the way the bots move across the box. But not a lot of builders use them. And as being like not really that much of a builder myself, I don't know the reason why and I'm curious to get everybody's thoughts on the reason why.
- [110:29]
Brandon
So the main reason why. So I have a lot of like, you know, very pet peeves and nitpicky things when it comes to designing wheels because I've seen a lot of not great wheels on like not omni wheel robots, but just in general because your wheels fundamentally need to be very durable and very strong. Your wheels are in a sense also armor, like in a lot of robots, like, like Maximizer, the wheels are basically the side armor. You know, they need to be able to take hits and be durable. And if you have to like completely armor up your wheels, that's just, that's so much weight that you have to put into that or else, you know, your wheels get touched once and then they don't work. So I guess to answer your question, it's primarily just a durability standpoint. Or I guess there's two and one is just durability because omni wheels, they have to have the separate little rollers on them. It's just innately it's going to be less durable. I think there's like, there's probably things you could do to make it more durable but that's just another layer of complexity. And then the other big thing is traction. Because when it comes to omni wheels, the, the way they work with the little kind of like ovular like rollers on them or I guess I'm thinking of mecanum wheels.
- [111:50]
Liam
They relate to each other.
- [111:51]
Brandon
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they're, they only have a very technically they only have like a single like point like that they contact the ground with. So they, they, they can't get that much traction. Like if you don't need traction. A lot of like you know, like first competitions, like you know, a lot of FTC robots I see using like mechanism and omni wheels, like they, the robots aren't allowed to touch each other. I don't know if that's still a thing. But in combat robots traction is a very, very big thing and you need traction. You need to be able to push people around and accelerate your robot. And a lot of times this the, it's just not worth the trade offs.
- [112:34]
Matt
And Liam kind of touched on it. Even like a robot like Shifty or that swerver. I can't remember if the other one Aaron made, he's like the only one who's done it. And, and Silverwind. Sorry.
- [112:45]
Liam
Oh, it was the lifter bot he made for teams.
- [112:49]
Brian
Yeah.
- [112:50]
Matt
But I'm thinking of Silverwind as well from I forget the person's name. They used to do Goose. My apologies. But indirectly you're also committing weight because for mecanum or omnis to work every wheel needs to be independently driven. You can't chain them with belts so you're putting two motors in each side and two more speed controllers. And for swerve it's similar. You need to have a way to change the axis rotation of the wheel which is more weight and that physical assembly takes more weight and space. It's sort of what people we kind of talked about. NTL shufflers are controversial now because people are like shufflers are so easy. They're just wheels and they're just as heavy as wheels. So why is that a problem? Well, you could almost view mecanum omni and even swerve to a degree in that vein where they're bad now. Like, there aren't enough people doing them. People aren't seeing the advantage and people are seeing the downside of I have to put a lot of weight into this, which means I'm making compromises elsewhere. And also just from my experience seeing them used, people don't drive them particularly well. Like FRC people when they people use mechanism and FRC and omni, they're trying to do strafes, to do things in different ways so they can avoid obstacles or keep a mechanism oriented. Technically speaking, people with verts could do that if they optimize their setup to be used with that and bounce it right. Oh my, can always face my opponent. But when I've seen it, people don't do it as well. And I think people, like create that negative connotation where it's like, oh, mechanism wheels are bad because every mechanism robot I've seen just dies immediately and their rollers break. Where people. I'm sure if people put time into it, can make a more durable mechanum wheel, could make their mix in their radio work well, similar to like a melty. Like melties were memes like 10 years ago. I'm pretty sure Halo been around for 10 years. I feel like, oh, yeah.
- [114:44]
Liam
Over that actually.
- [114:45]
Matt
And people are like, oh, this robot can't even drive like. But liftoff can now, like translate across the box pretty accurately. Like, it's all about development and time. So I think that's why you don't see a lot of omnidirectional stuff because people just haven't wanted to put the time into it yet to make it good and it's harder to do.
- [115:03]
Liam
And then even going with that because I think probably the most innovation I've seen as far as mechanic goes is probably shattered. And the Bots FC team. I had to spend at least what, four or five seasons of BattleBots tuning that to make the robot work. I see the vision. The whole point is, as with the vert, as with the hammer, your whole point is face towards enemy at all points. Also robot called face towards enemy, which is funny, our front towards enemy. But the whole vision is that if you can have it so you're always turning the right direction, that does in fact have a potential. I know that if you're vert, for example, your greatest openings when you're driver dancing, where the whole side the robot's lifting off the ground and now you're unable to, you know, move very tight turns. You have to sort of dance around it and yet at the same time. Promhetta though gyro do gyros. Zach's actively worked on like having like anti gyro stoppers on the side of the armor for Primeheada. He's even used the gyro to his advantage times to dodge out of the way because he's so used to the tuning of it. And he's been doing that without losing any of the power and strength in Primeheta. So then he's just able to roll up, punch you in the ceiling and keep doing it like 10 more times until you're psychologically broken and the robot's on fire. And then this is how it goes. And so the mechanum wheels have a really beautiful idea with it. I think it'd require a bit more technological advancements to make them common and durable. Certainly programming as well as also factor. It just takes more thought to drive one than it does a tank style one. You put it in there. It's like a very simple mixing of, of just making it like a tank. It just drives like any sort of vehicle like that versus mechan. We can have to like think of three dimensions. Like it can rotate, it can go forward, back, left and right and then rotate about its own axis. That requires more thought and like Matt said, I think is the biggest one. Ultimately the control has to be really built into it because I have to. I have to expect that. Adam and the rest of the Bot FC team spent a great deal of time honing Shatter's drivetrain in the test boxes in between fights at BattleBots to make sure it's like just right when you rewatch fights. He's very careful in how he wants to rotate the robot. And it's for that exact reason, because he wants to make sure the face is always towards the enemy. But in the high speed environment of Comet robot fights, especially in a system where the more you add failure modes, the more they will be found because level of energy put into the robots, it's just a frightful thing. Like again, give it time and seeing their focus. I'm sure if you set aside a builder and you said, all right, like Atomy Wong when he developed Droopy, I'm just gonna give you like a full year of just testing this one idea and just honing it into absolute perfection. And after a thousand punches, Droopy was honed to like the most effective single punch that just slaughtered the rest of the field for the entire year. And honestly, years to, to the. To even the present day, really, if he ran more, I doubt he would lose very often. So with mecanums, it'd probably be a similar case of like, you need more people to sort of buy into it. And with shufflers, that was the idea until people sort of started thinking, oh, well, now I don't need to. So I bet you now shuffler advancement is going to decrease with time as people don't want to lean into it as hard or they feel like they've already hit what they need to hit and they just kind of do it. And so that kind of direction advancement is what sort of gets built up by events as they incentivize that and want to lean into it. And I think that's where I think technology being affected by people in real time.
- [118:43]
Brandon
Yeah, I don't, and I don't mean to, I guess, you know, beat a dead horse with this, but whenever, like you're designing, I feel like any robot, I feel like the most important thing is that is reliability and durability. You know, at the end of the two minutes, a minute left on the clock, both robots are limping. You know, the one that's more reliable is gonna come out on top. And if your robot needs to be at full functionality to be effective in the slightest, then that's just not how the sport works. You know, stuff is going to fail. Like, stuff is going to fail a lot. And if you don't have like, you know, either these layers of redundancy or like, you know, this can fail and this can fail, like, my entire side of my armor can get ripped off and everything's fine. I can still go like, if. If you don't have that, then that's not good. Like, even if you're like, you know, and your robots driving now, like at an angle, like still like partial wheel functionality, full functionality on the other wheel, like you can still win a fight like that. But yeah, it's just like when it comes to the gain mobility, like you can just drive better. You can just get good drive.
- [119:55]
Liam
As a great man once said, you just control bots.
- [119:58]
Brandon
Yeah, just.
- [119:59]
Matt
No, no, no. I was going to quote the great Derek Tran, just skill issue.
- [120:03]
Liam
Skills.
- [120:04]
Brandon
Yes, 100%. Like you can.
- [120:08]
Matt
And to Liam's point, one of the other things I think that's important is in all archetypes and all developments, passion. If you're passionate about it, you'll make it better. If you aren't, I've seen hundreds of terrible four wheel drive and two wheel drive verts. They're like, it's the apex predator. And I've watched it be bad because the person clearly wasn't passionate about it. Where I've seen, like, for example, the robot that I point to that I'm like, that robot's bad. And I was proven wrong. Was Eli with hot wings. I'm like, this robot's bad. And then he just started melting through people because he took the time and developed it because he cared about it. So if you care enough, you can make it good. It's just time, energy, and money. If you're willing to put those things into it, you can do it.
- [120:49]
Brandon
The best design. Pick a design and make it the best design.
- [120:52]
Brian
That's. Yeah, I was going to say pretty much the same thing as, you know, success is not measured by designs. It's measured by failure. Right. Like, you know, you fail, you. You go back, you rebuild it, you fix the things that happened. I mean, if you ask John who built WAR hard, he said, you know, that robot was drawn on paper. I think it was the Fingertech beater bar when he started. And then three years later, he's winning a dumpster. And it's because every tournament, he would identify, you know, 4, 5, 10 things that he wanted to fix. He'd fix them, he'd fight again. And he just repeated that process until warhard became, you know, what it is now, which is one of the scariest spots to sit across the arena from. So it's just all about, you know, failing and then fixing it and trying again.
- [121:28]
Liam
WAR became hard.
- [121:34]
Christine
I. That's. That's just a good, good note to wrap things up.
- [121:39]
Brian
Christine, can I say one thing? Sorry, Yeah. I think it's a travesty that we went through shufflers, hammer saws, and big wedges, and no one mentioned the wall in bed. So I just want to give a shout out to, like, the bed and the wall. Like, sorry, we didn't mention you in any of those categories, but, you know, that is. That is the epitome of the wall, brother.
- [121:57]
Matt
That's the wall.
- [121:59]
Christine
I'm gonna say that I. I did.
- [122:01]
Matt
That was received.
- [122:03]
Brian
My example retracted what I said, but still. Shout out to Ben.
- [122:07]
Christine
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It just goes to show, like, kind of what you all said at the end there about, like, passion and kind of pouring things into a robot and into a design. If you keep doing that and iterating on it, like, you're going to have success. So I think that's probably the biggest point of all. But yeah, really everything really well said by everybody. I mean, a big part of why I wanted to do this is because I think that talking through all of this is super educational for those that either have not built a robot before or are less experienced and looking to look for new ideas and things like that. Because for me, innovation and creativity is the. The name of the game. So. So if you are watching this, please make sure that you like, subscribe, share, engage, comment in the comments, let me know what your favorite robot archetype is. I'd be curious to see what people say, but If I see 20 comments, perverts though, I'm. I'm coming after people. No, all robots are valid. All robots are valid. So thank you to everybody for joining this discussion. I will be having episodes breaking down some of these categories more in depth because I think, honestly, had we had four hours to talk about all of this, we probably would have used all four hours to talk about this. So I think there's more that can be said. But yeah, there will be more on that, more to come. Keep watching and we'll see everybody next time on the show.