Introduction
There are a lot of guides out there that will talk about specific parts that are good to use, materials you should build from, and where to get parts. Those are all important things to know and are a critical part of gaining the understanding you need to build a combat robot. This guide isn’t about that. This guide is on ways to approach whatever bot you’re building that can set you up for the best experience possible.
What are “Best Practices”
Best practices, in this context, are the tools and techniques you use in the design, build, and battling of your robot that set you up for success. Success doesn’t necessarily mean wins, as that may not be the goal of the bot. Success means delivering on the idea you had for the bot.
Core Best Practices
Design for Your Manufacturing
The best design in the world isn’t worth anything if you can’t actually make it. What fabrication options do you have available? Do you have the time, tools and skills to do it yourself? Do you have the budget to outsource? Is this even something that can be made? These are all things you need to think about when designing.
Design for Availability
The perfect part may exist, but you need to actually be able to get it for it to be useful. Everything from screws to speed controllers can run into the problem of it being the “perfect” solution that you can’t order. You also don’t want to find yourself in the spot where you can’t buy spares of your preferred weapon motor because it was discontinued 4 years ago and the ebay seller you’ve been buying from finally ran out of stock.
Design for Safety
No matter the size of your bot, thinking about safety features early can be a massive help. How will your weapon lock actually work? Where are the sharp corners/edges? How easy is it to access your power switch? Not spending the time on this early can result in having to modify your design after the bot’s been built to accommodate a mandatory safety feature. Beyond that, having an easy to install/remove weapon lock and easy to operate power switch will make your load in and load out go smoother which means you’ll be ready to fight or repair faster.
Design for Assembly
When designing your bot take time to think about how each part goes into the bot. It’s very easy to design yourself into a corner where all of the parts are physically capable of occupying the space as designed, but due to how the bot is constructed or the order in which things go together you can find yourself unable to install a part or without access to a critical fastener.
Design for Repair
This is robot combat. Stuff will break. Unless you’ve got a spare robot for every fight, which while technically an option is a massive expense and likely a significant waste of resources you’re going to have to make repairs. When you look at a design you need to consider the parts that are most likely to take damage and look at the process to repair or replace them. If you’ve got 20 minutes to repair between fights and it takes you 15 minutes to get a busted gearbox out you’re likely not making your next match with a working robot.
Design for Failure
Classes in robot combat are defined by a weight limit. This means that for any given class you don’t have infinite weight to make parts stronger. If a bot gets hit hard enough something will fail. Ideally, this something is not catastrophic to your ability to finish the match, is easy to replace, and isn’t the most expensive part of the robot. Designing mechanical fuses so you can influence the failure points can create a situation where you’ve got inexpensive, easy to address repairs between fights instead of having to toss out more expensive parts because none of the cheap stuff broke.
Design for Maintenance
Similar to repairs, inevitably there’s stuff you’ll need to do to your robot between fights. Maybe it’s replacing worn out wheels, sharpening the leading edge of a wedge, or adjusting belt tension. It almost certainly will also be charging or changing your batteries. Think about how these tasks will be performed and try to minimize the time this will take. You’ll thank yourself later when you have repairs that need to be done on a tight timeline and all of the regular maintenance isn’t occupying most of that time.
Advanced Best Practices
This section covers topics that are much more involved and time intensive than the core best practices section. Treat these topics as “worthwhile if time allows” as you can get by without them when necessary, but integrating them into your process will be well worth the effort.
Driving Practice
The more time you can spend driving your bot the more comfortable you’ll be running it at an event. To the degree practical, matching the type of floor and floor coating will only help. With non-spinners and bots that aren’t likely to throw parts/debris you can get a lot of practice in by using a floor and a small protective barrier to keep the bot contained. On bots with spinning weapons or other systems that can send chunks flying you’ll need to think more on containment which may limit your practice surface options. Ideally you’ll be at the point where you’re comfortable enough with your bot that the bot is doing what you want without you actively thinking about how to manipulate the controller to cause that action.
Design for Aesthetics
There’s nothing wrong with keeping things simple, but taking the time to add some color, shape, or style to your bot can result in a bot that is memorable in and out of the box.
Minimize Tools and Hardware Variation
To the degree you can, you want to minimize the number of different wrenches, nuts, bolts, drivers, and other equipment needed. This will save both your back and time in the long run. If you’re working on a bot and you’ve got some 10-32 bolts in there in 7/16”, ½” and 9/16” lengths you should probably take a step back and see if there’s a good option to reduce that to one length, similarly if you’re designing the bot and have an entire catalog of thread sizes it’s worth the effort to look at areas where you can change the bolt size used and cut an entire bolt size out of the spares pile for an event.