Tom uses a plasma cutter to cut wheel wells in our 3/16″ hardened steel plate.
Disgruntled Chef is the second iteration of our “wokbot” featherweight ComBot. The first iteration, “Overnight Delivery” was built for the December 2009 ComBots Cup in under 48 hours due to a shipping mixup. Our team, Tesla Prime were extremely excited to have several months of build time this time around, rather than 2 days. While the weapon type stayed the same (an upturned wok used as a wedge), the internal design was greatly modified, and we saw significantly increased performance over the last generation.
Armor:
Overnight Delivery used a circular 3/16″ steel plate with a diameter of 15″ as a base, and a 16″ diameter steel wok (approximately 1/32″ thick). The difference in diameters meant that the wok would overhang the base plate, rather than be reinforced by it. For Disgruntled Chef, we cut a 16″ diameter circle, and ground down the edges by hand to get a perfect, snug fit with the wok. Additionally, we bought a thicker wok (approximately 1/16″), to hold up to more punishment.
Armor Mounting:
With Overnight Delivery, our armor mounts were steel brackets, bent into a curve using a vice and a hammer, and attached to the chassis and wok with a buffer of thick rubber for shock absorption. These served us well, but for Chef’s design, we decided to make the same curved bracket shape out of aluminum, in hopes that it would be soft enough to absorb more shock than the steel. These turned out to work fairly well, but due to the softness of the metal, it was very easy to mangle the threads, so it was more effective, but harder to work with. Additionally, we changed the construction of our center support column, making it much sturdier to the point where in a test, out 3/16″ steel plate bent before our center column did.
Electronics:
There were some major changes where electronics were concerned. Overnight’s bird’s nest of wires was no more, Chef’s wires all connected neatly through a bus in the center of the robot. Additionally, we added a bright green power indicator LED, and upgraded our master power switch. We mounted speed controllers on thick, soft rubber to help absorb shock, and motors were mounted on aluminum plates and rubber- to ensure maximum shock distribution and absorption.
Spinning up for the first time.
Weapons:
Though we decided against giving Chef an active weapon, we instead left a corner of our originally square (now otherwise circular) baseplate attached. This corner was then sharpened, and used as a wedge, as well as a bludgeon- Chef’s wheel configuration allows him to “spin up” very quickly using just his drive motors, essentially creating an active weapon.
Batteries:
This time around, we opted to use 2x 18 volt batteries wired in parallel, rather than just 1 at a time, this increased both our torque, and our battery life- Chef runs longer and stronger than Overnight ever did. We also created brackets to help hold the batteries in place, in addition to the velcro we used to hold them down.
All in all, our Disgruntled Chef was a huge improvement compared to Overnight Delivery. We had a great time building and fighting him, and can’t wait till the next ComBots event, where we plan to bring an even better design with an active weapon!
Pictures & Videos:
Disgruntled Chef pictured fully assembled minus his top armor
Disgruntled Chef with his armor on
Chef participates in a featherweight rumble versus Pinball and The Bully
Chef takes a tremendous hit from Shaka, a robot with a vertical spinning disk weapon. Though Disgruntled Chef was inverted by the hit, all of the damage sustained was to the armor- the bot itself still worked fine, which we attribute to careful internal design.
