So it begins...

My project this summer entails building a house robot for the University of Bristol's Robot Wars. This, much like the original TV show, which we all know and love, involves pitting two robots against each other until one robot is either immobilised or thrown out of the arena.

However, this robot is to compete in the antweight series of Robot Wars. There are a few differences between the antweight series and the televised one (heavyweight). The main one being (obviously) the weight. Heavyweight robots have a weight limit of 100kg whereas the antweights have a limit of only 150g and have to be able to fit into a 4" cube. Also, antweight robot arenas have two sides with no barriers for the robots to be pushed off.

This video  shows the last robot wars at Bristol.

From this you can see what kind of robot I am aiming to build. However, there is one main difference between my robot and all the others. Mine is going to be a house robot.

A house robot is an obstacle in the main arena that takes part in every single battle. House robot's are bigger (no weight or size limit) but are restricted to certain zones and only take part in the action when a players robot enters that zone and once the player leaves that zone, it cannot chase.

House Robot's for the original Robot Wars TV series

House robots are an important part in the robot wars TV series success. They provided a recurring character that the audience could latch on to and would still be there if a popular competitor was knocked out at an early stage.With that in mind, it is important that the whole design of the house robot is to look seriously "cool" and threatening. All the other robots in the original series have "characters" to play and were all very unique so it would be best if I decided on a theme to go with first.

After talking to some of the previous years competitors for inspiration, it was decided that I would make a scorpion type robot with claws and a hammer. The idea being that it would not destroy robots, only pick them up and move them to break up the play, and with a hammer that looks really cool but doesn't do loads of damage With this decided the next stage would be to start designing an initial model on CAD and choosing parts.