Krave Antweight Robot Gets Eaten And Stays Alive

The battle’s are done and the results are in — [AltaPowderDog]’s, aka [Carter Hurd],  cardboard and foam armor, lightweight Krave robot beat its metal cousins in 2016 and fared well in 2017. How did a cardboard Krave cereal box and foam board robot do that you ask? The cardboard and foam outer structure was sliced, smashed and generally eaten while the delicate electronics, motors and wheels remained buried safely inside.

We covered the making of his 2016 version but didn’t follow-up with how it fared in that year’s Illinois Bot Brawl competition. As you can see in the exciting first …read more

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Arise, Chicken, Arise!

A couple of months ago, [Mike] started saving bones from all the fried chicken he had been eating. If that’s the opening line, you know it’s going to be good.

This Cyborg Chicken project grew out of [Mike]’s love for battlebots, and an immense dearth of battleborgs. The difference, though small, is distinct: a robot is simply a machine that carries out instructions either automatically or via remote control. A cyborg, on the other hand, contains both organic and biomechatronic body parts. Since [Mike] was saving chicken bones, he stumbled upon the idea of creating a cyborg out …read more

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Butter Passing Battlebot

The idea of purpose is one of great importance to many sentient beings; one can only imagine the philosophical terror experienced by a robot designed solely to pass butter. Perhaps wishing to create a robot with more reason to exist, [Micah “Chewy” Leibowitz] decided to build this battlebot armed with a flamethrower, named Flamewar.

In the video, we see it rather successfully facing off against a robot named T800, at least in the early part of the fight. T800 is armed with a spinning weapon, and while it is able to deliver a heavy thump thanks to stored kinetic energy, …read more

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Welcome to the Drone Wars

“DroneClash” is a competition to be held on December 4th (save the date!) in a hangar at Valkenburg airfield in the Netherlands. The game? Teams try to destroy each others’ quadcopters, navigate through a “Hallway of Doom, Death, and Destruction”, and finally enter a final phase of the game where they try to defend their “queen” drone while taking out those of their opponents.

This sounds like crazy and reckless fun. Surprisingly, it’s being sponsored by the Technical University of Delft’s Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) lab. The goal is to enable a future of responsible drone use by having the …read more

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Denver Mini Maker Faire Roundup

I had a great time at Denver’s 3rd annual Mini Maker Faire, which was held inside the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The official theme this year was “Building the Future” and looking back, I can tell you that they pulled the theme off well. There was a strong turnout in two categories that are crucial to building the future: the growth that comes from education at all ages and the physical places where learning becomes immersive.

The Really Fun Stuff

[Casey] from Caustic Creations were showing off Poison Arrow just in time for season 2 of the BattleBots …read more

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