One of the few designs I've made over the years that was designed to be competitive was Barrel Roll. Barrell Roll was a vertical drum spinner, 2WD wedge bot. Very inline with the current meta of winning robots. Unfortunately, my design and manufacturing skills weren't up to my lofty aspirations. Barrell Roll was plagued with problems: off balance weapon, RF interference issues, underpowered weapon motors, durability issues, etc. Barrel Roll never won a fight, even through 2 iterations. It was a frustrating experience to say the least. I eventually gave up on the design for my other beetle-weight design, El Tigre. I've since built and sold El Tigre and haven't had a beetle-weight since.
Recently, I've had the itch to design another beetle-weight, and given the fierce competition out there in the beetle-weight class, I want it to be competitive. To show not only how far I've come as a designer and engineer, but to show how far combat robotics has come in the past 5 years, I wanted to re-design Barrel Roll. I wanted to keep the same overall layout and design, but with some serious upgrades that should help solve lots of the issues with the original design.
I wanted to start from scratch for this design to help eliminate any lingering design issues from the previous version. My design process as of lately always starts with a layout sketch in Solidworks. This allows me to easily and quickly get a feel for how big things are in relation to one another. Later on, I use this sketch to actually make some of the parts for a "top down" assembly design where the single sketch controls the dimensions of many parts of the assembly in order to easily tweak the design later on.
Weapon System
Electronics
Drive ESCs are still the Fingertech Tiny ESCs as I've yet to find a better ESC for this weight class. The biggest challenge I had in this design was finding a proper battery to fit in here. There are limited options for batteries in this capacity range with even more limited size options. I ended up settling on a pair of Turnigy Nanotech 850mAh 2S LiPo batteries in series for the equivalent of a 4S 850mAh battery.
Weapon ESC is a Turnigy Multistar BLHeli 32 41A ESC. It's pretty crazy to me how small these ESCs have become over the years with the advances of drone technology. Also in the picture above is the Flysky 4CH receiver and Fingertech power switch, both staples of all of my insect weight robots.
Structure
Forks Edition
Overall I'm very happy with the design. I think it showcases a lot of the things that I've learned over the past 5 years on the design side, as well as a lot of the advances in the field of combat robotics including smaller electronics, combat robot specific parts, and readily available online manufacturing resources. I hope to build this up sometime in the next few months or so after I finish rebuilding my other two active bots, Drop Test and Butcher. I'm definitely excited to get back to being competitive in combat robotics. With that I'll leave you with this lame attempt at a render of my design so we can all pretend it's already real and not just some files on my computer.