robotic competition

robot wars, or whatever was with billy nye, and that other one were kind of cool. The only problem is that they were remote controlled.

The darpa competitions are quite neat.

We need to have an arena style fight, with autonomous robots, where the differences are primarily programming and ingenuity


I propose an arena with ammunition depots, and spare parts, with data ports to connect to supercomputers with pre optimized image and other sensor recognition libraries available.

There should be

amunition depot amunition depot
Team1 Team2
super computer super computer
table saw table saw
high caliber rifle high caliber rifle
plywood ...
metal parts with predefined drill points and quick connects (ala erector set)
110volt wall outlets
length of copper wire with easy connect plugs.


There should be objectives, such as 3 targets that if one is destroyed, that team looses
There could be "flags" as well, so that if a team retrieves so many flags, it wins.


All robots should have a safety mechanism whereby if it doesn't recieve the keep alive signal, it shuts down. This should be a seporate circuit, and the rules dictate that this frequency cannot be jammed.


Each team should be allowed to bring in a certain mass of extra items, and it should be limited by initial volume.

living biological agents, and most nuclear devices should be prohited, but high explosives and strong acids, napalm should be allowed.


after a period of time, It should "rain" to short circuit damaged robots.

The course should have a mud bog, a water zone, concrete block, and plywood towers.

There should be a network of cameras built into the environment that can be leached off of for survaylance.


All teams should pay a standard fee, and materials should be available from the company to build their robots. Some items might be rented, such as expensive armor.

Standard cameras and other sensors should be provided as part of the fee.

The fee should be no more than $2,000 per tournament.

network access to a $20,000 ish super computer or cluster should be provided by the organization, and provide image recognition and other services.

Environment destruction is allowed.

The environment shall have a solid concrete floor, and an elevated house like floor as the main playing field. If the robots can cut through it, they can "burrow" and travel underground.

The size of the battle room should be 12ft x 12ft x12ft, Most environmental structures should be made out of paper, some out of plywood, and some out of steel.

2 .22 caliber handguns with clip/robot easy to load clip) should be provided on each side of the playing field. 1 higher caliber weapon should be purched on a tower on each side.

The team mass should not exceed 50kg


Basic strategies, There would exist multiple targets to cause designers to avoid super large robots.

Each team would be given an 802.11n channel, or other less interference proned device, that it would be illegal to jam.

Of course, ripping down a cast iron pan obsticdal and placing it ontop of a scout would stop the signal ;)