Building a battle box

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tomchaps
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Building a battle box

Post by tomchaps »

I volunteer at a kid-centric hackerspace am hoping to build an antweight battlebox for the kids to use. It won't be enclosed at first, since we'll begin with a no-kinetic-weapons rule, but I do have a big sheet of 4mm polycarb someone donated for a future upgrade.

Could someone share typical dimensions and materials used in the AWS competitions? I see that the rules require a minimum 30" square, but it looks like most of the ones I see on the videos are rectangular, maybe 36" by 30"? I've been trying to eyeball the size of the pits and the height of the side walls, but would appreciate any actual measurements from someone who has made one.

Also, what is the floor made of? I presume that it has to be made of a single piece to keep any wrinkles from messing up the driving.

Thanks in advance...
Occashokka
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Re: Building a battle box

Post by Occashokka »

This is the old discussion thread for the current arena, I can't find the original posts with all the exact dimensions, Pete may be able to help more than I can :o

http://www.robotwars101.org/forum/viewt ... f=1&t=2339
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I'm gonna build something huge and stupid, try and stop me :P
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BeligerAnt
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Re: Building a battle box

Post by BeligerAnt »

Most arenas are defined mostly by the sizes of material available!

30" square is plenty big enough if you are using modified servos for drive. A bigger arena can make for some very boring fights unless the robots are very fast. Conversely, if all the robots are very fast a bigger arena might be better, especially if you want to run melees with several robots in the arena at once.

Any pit needs to be about 6" wide to make sure robots fall into it properly. Hence your base board (and future enclosure) needs to be quite a bit bigger than the fighting area. This is the reason many arenas only have pits on two sides.

Robots can be pushed/lifted over 2" walls with a bit of luck and quite a lot of effort (unless you have a pneumatic flipper!). Most ants can push another over a 1" wall without too much trouble (even a decent shove without an active weapon!).
It might be worth considering some really low "walls", maybe 1/4" to 1/2", to stop people accidentally driving out of the arena if you are expecting a lot of inexperienced kids.

Removable walls are also a good idea if you want to help people learn to drive and fight without having to put robots back into the arena every 10 seconds!
If you make the walls in removable sections you can also vary the amount of drop-off.
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peterwaller
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Re: Building a battle box

Post by peterwaller »

Here are the dimensions of my arena.
Image
The arena floor is hardboard and is cut to the red outline in the plan view with two of the curved edges having short walls and two no walls.
Image
Just updated to get the images to display again.
Last edited by peterwaller on Mon Sep 11, 2017 6:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
tomchaps
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Re: Building a battle box

Post by tomchaps »

We actually began buying stuff for our neighborhood battle box--based mostly on scrounged supplies. (We found a 1/4" sheet of polycarb that's 48x39 inches, and 80/20 channel that's in 16" lengths.)

Given our scraps, we could build a 3'x4' or even 4'x4' arena, but the roof would only be 12" from the floor of the arena. Would this be an issue? Having the bots bounce of the ceiling is cool, right?

Could we get away with a thinner roof panel, or should that be 4mm, as well? (We were looking at 1/8", which is 3.175mm...)
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