APSF Robotics
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WulfBane's RAV-3 Middle Weight Battle Bot Time to start "WulfBane" in the "Robotic Assault Vehicle, mark-3" configuration. Design: The body consists of a 14 gauge steel fabricated body. Attached are two main 10" drive wheels powered by NPC-60522 wheel chair motors at 36V. The top is 1/4" Lexan. At the robot's back is a new variation of the "Bane Axe" that I'm also referring to as the "Wulf Wedge". The front slope also has attachment points where various modular attachments can be added. Attack Tactic: In the RAV-3 configuration, WulfBane is now a pure ram/pushing robot. Should the situation arise, attachments can be put onto the robots front and back to add additional specializations to make the robot more suited for the opponent. Upgrades from the previous version: Since the old RAV-1/RAV-2 body was, for all intensive purposes, destroyed by Garm at Bot Bash 2001, an entirely new body was designed. The new body is 2 inches narrower, clearance was reduced to only 1" and now sports a sloped ramp to help with the robot's new role of pushing and bashing bots across the arena. I also upgraded from SLA's to NiCd Battle Packs to be able to source more current to the motors. Additional Upgrades: Due to the typical lineage combat robots take, upgrades to one bot affect the upgrades to another robot. What I now refer to as the "RAV-3.1", WulfBane is now using Aconite's upgraded NPC-80522 motors at 36V, giving the robot nearly 10MPH of speed and more power. The lexan lid that received a few cuts from SOB's sawblade is being changed with a 1/8" aluminum lid. New tail assemblies and front end attachments are also in the works. Current Status - retired After using the shell for over two years and seven full events, I finally moved on with the 120lb robot. The figurative torch has been passed to "WulfRam" (details on this robot to be added). Fight History Las Vegas Street Fight #2 (Feb 2002) - Unfortunately, there was a low turn out in the MW and HW classes, so the one HW there (a Robotica 3 bot Particle Accelerator) and the two MWs (WulfBane and Chameleon by some guys at Westwood Studios) were combined into one class. I schooled Particle Accelerator in our two fights and then won a close fight against Chameleon (who had to go without his spinning weapon due to the lack of any sort of protective barriers for the spectators). In the rumble, WulfBane did some good pushing & shoving, but eventually got stuck on the curb (after a period stranded on its back) and John Hoffman's LW "Buzz Bomb" won the all-weight class rumble (Buzz Bomb used to be his MW Scheduled For Destruction). Finally, we had a Bot Ball match. It was close pushing back & forth against Buzz, but suddenly, my rx switch (which was just sitting loose inside the bot unmounted) ended up getting flipped off and I was motionless as he pushed the "ball" (a Simpsons car) through the goal. But everything was fun! Final outcome: 3-0 one-on-one, MW/HW Champ. BattleBots 5.0 (May 2002) - Back to Treasure Island. Well, my first fight was scheduled to be against Microvore, the MW baby brother to Team Shrapnel's HW Mechavore (this was the robot that "opened Vlad the Impaler like a can of tuna" at BBots 3.0). I "bricked-up" WulfBane's front wedge area with lexan, wood, and a good sized piece of angle iron. Unfortunately, they were never able to get the robot working and I advanced off of a forfeit. Next fight was against Justin Chou's "Hipopononomus". While it was originally supposed to be another horizontal spinning disk robot, Justin couldn't get that working so he slapped an NPC-64038 motor and the hammer arm from his LW Paladin and driven by another pair of 64038's at 24V (both bots were capable of about the same top speed). Finally, some real carnage! Fight starts, and the newer, faster Wulf runs across the arena. I wasn't afraid of the hammer and actually wanted to see what it could do to me. While the details of the fight are kind of a blur, I remember getting under the front of Hipop many times and slamming him into the wall hard. Eventually, after all the slams, Hipop's hammer motor broke off. Well, after 2 minutes of shoving the kid around the arena, WulfBane wins 26-19. Top casters were a bit dented from the hammer, but not worth changing. (I also managed to wow a lot of people and many considered it a great action-packed match even though there were no spinners or parts flying) Now I fight "the giant dustpan", otherwise known as Sony Online Entertainment's MW "S.O.B." (the acronym is for "Sony Online Battlebot" and was decorated with Everquest stuff). Man, I get to fight another computer game company!!! Knowing that I could easily get stuck in their tray, I went into this fight planning on faking them out by driving tail-end first, miss on purpose, then be in perfect position to push them from behind. That plan was scrapped in the first 5 seconds of the fight when I realized that I couldn't make WulfBane drive backwards straight. The bot just kept whipping around forward due to the weight distribution and being only a 2WD bot. Plan B was to just try to drive normal and aim for either their pontoons or try to get around the back. Sadly, this resulted in a lot of "dancing" and I got scooped up into S.O.B.'s tray, slammed into the wall, and a few cuts from their overhead saw-arm. After 2 minutes, WulfBane lost (I think the score was 17-28 or something like that). And this was the round just before TV! Oh well, it was a great fight against a very tough design to fight against and S.O.B. ended up in 2nd place overall to only loose to T-Minus in the MW finals. Overall results: 1-1 (plus a bye by forfeit.) Las Vegas Street Fight #3 (July 2002) - Man, Ed's little event sure has grown. Now we are calling it by "Robo Joust", which was a plan that Ed had a year back for an event in Kansas (where he used to live before moving out to Las Vegas). We had 5 MW's this time and even through it was double elimination, WulfBane had only one fight. That fight was against John Hoffman's robot with an identity crisis. Rather then the pneumatic plumbing pipe on Scheduled For Destruction or the LW with pneumatic tires of Buzz Bomb, this form of the robot was called "Snapper" and sported a large pneumatic flipping/clamping jaw. This was a nasty dirty fight. Snapper was able to keep the fight really close, so I wasn't able to do too many direct shoves. WulfBane also got rolled onto its back AGAIN (this is the 4th or 5th time it has happened in the limited number of fights with this version) He even managed to clamp onto the Wulf Wedge tail! Well, that peeved me off, so I figured "if you want the tail, take the tail!" and went into thwack mode. I got in a good number of hits like this, knocking off a few things from Snapper (including the cover over the CO2 tank held on with duct tape), but eventually, my welds couldn't take the swings, and the tail broke off of at the base. The match eventually ended and I managed to pull off the win (I think mainly due to aggression). But when I went over to the bot to turn it off, I heard a "sizzling" sound. It seemed that when the bot got inverted, the stuff I had between the metal straps & the batteries got shoved to the side, the metal straps scraped at the shrink wrap on the batteries, and caused some of the batteries to short out. I may have won, but I suffered lethal damage and had to forfeit the remaining matches. Overall results: 1-2 (two losses were forfeits due to damage sustained during the first fight) Steel Conflict 2 (Feb 2003) - I missed the first one of these while I was preparing Aconite for Bot Bash 2002, but I was certain to make it to number 2. The arena was similar to the BattleBot arena in that it was The first match was against a horizontal spinning disk robot that while I started well taking hits and slowing them down, one hit managed to put enough shock through the robot that (in conjunction with all the previous hits the robot had taken) the master power switch had its back end break off and kill the robots power. No power meant I had to concede the match with a knock out. Fortunately it was a double elimination tournament and I had a spare power switch with me. The next bot was a large wedge robot named Jimmy. Both of our drives were quite similar, but I knew my drive train was a bit faster than his and I had some confidence in my driving skills with how much I have actually driven this robot and it's predecessors. Those skills were paying off for the first 2 minutes and 30 seconds of the match. I was over powering and pushing him all over the arena. Even after the robot rolled (yes, again) I was able to out push him. I did have a bit of a scare when I shoved him into one corner and when he hit, I started driving up and nearly went over Jimmy and over the guard rail. It was apparent to me that I was about to win the match on points, but in the last of the 3 times Jimmy was actually pushing me, he had me lined up with one of the two "pits" in the arena. He pushed me into the pit and while he followed me in, the rules gave him the instant win because he was the one doing the pushing. So, now I was eliminated but had a well functioning robot. When they get down to the end of the event, they often hold grudge matches and rumble matches with already eliminated bots to give the finalists some extra time between their matches as well as keep stuff going on in the arena for the audience. I took part in one of the 4 way free-for-all rumbles that consisted of a rookie team's "Tuka the Cat", the MW wedge "Mosquito" by long time veteran and great driver Steven Felk, and an interesting robot called "Tesla's Tornado". Without going into too much detail, Tesla's Tornado was the only spinner but could pack a wallop. The plan I had in my head was to take out Tuka and shove him into a pit and hope that Felk and I can team up to pin Tesla into a corner of the arena (he had to spin to even move). Well, I pit Tuka as planned, but when I did, I noticed that Felk managed to pit himself! Well, only two things remained in the arena, Tesla's Tornado spinning away and Tuka's paper machete cat head. I actually took a moment to aim the robot at both targets when I eventually decided to just go for the actual robot. After bouncing off a couple times and getting Tesla near a corner, a final hit resulted in the replacement switch to break just like it did in the first match. Oh well. It was another fun event none the less. Overall results: 0-2 (plus being the last KO in a 4 way free for all rumble) Las Vegas Street Fight #5 (April 2003) - Back with the Wulf name for yet another Vegas event. This report has gotten long, so I'll keep it short. I did quite well here. While I lost the first match (flipped over then pushed out the "exit door"), I won the next three matches in the losers bracket with some exciting results. Then my fifth and final match was against Psychotron. Yes another wedge with a similar drive train. Well, I think I rolled my bot 2-3 times in the course of this match but I eventually lost a judges decision (while it was unanimous, they said that Psychotron barely won each judge's vote). After the main tournament, the super heavyweight robot Blue Max had issued a challenge to take all comers for all weight classes in the "Mother Of All Bot Battles". Well, the plan was to retire this robot and start a new "Wulf" robot after this event so I gladly entered. With probably 20 or so robots ranging from 1lb to 220lbs each, Blue Max basically ended up doing some "crowd surfing" on top of everybody swarming him. They eventually declared everybody else the winner and it became a total free-for-all. I was doing some good bashing but eventually, the end bell from one of the motors broke off and caused one motor to be TOTALLY dead. Man, it was a blast!!!! Las Vegas Street Fight #6 (Oct 2003) - Another quick update. This event was interesting. Instead of the usual bracketed format, the matches in this event were done with a "survivor" format. Each match started with 5 robots in the arena and they all fought each other. But rather than there being one winner in each match, there was instead one LOSER declared and the remaining 4 bots moved on to fight each other in the next round. The losers moved to a losers bracket where they fought together in a similar (yet different) group battle format, but could only hope for a 2nd place win at best. Well, I was doing quite well in the first match, but then I just suddenly stop! Turns out, a little 4 ounce battery for the receiver came out of it's mounting and with the shocks, it was flying around inside the body of the bot then eventually unplugged itself. Loser's bracket match was close, but I lost that as well since the opponent I had was able to just get under me. I did go on and team up with another Tucson based team with their MW robot "Carnivorous Bunny" for a 2-on-2 Bot-Ball match. It was tough, but we managed to win. So while I didn't win the combat event, we did score a trophy for that. Progress Photos
The following companies used to obtain the parts
for the RAV-3. NPC Inc. - Source of wheelchair drive motors and second set of wheels. Highly recommended! Vantec Inc. - RDFR speed controllers. While they tend to have a bit of a lag time on the orders, the speed controllers work quite nicely. Team Delta - Kill switch. Tons of Robotic related info and products available. Battle Packs - NiCd battery packs. Wide selection of battery voltage and current capacities as well as offering custom built pack options. Futaba Corp. - Manufacturer of radio transmitter and receiver. Tower Hobbies - Used to obtain various RC equipment. Hobby Town, USA - Nation wide hobby store chain. Additional RC equipment and batteries. Quick Custom Metals - Local metal fabrication shop. Western Drawn Products - Machined one of the sets of hubs. Home Depot - Primary hardware store that various nuts, bolts, castors, and other misc. parts came from. Other local hardware stores were also used for other misc. parts. |
