The Destructobot For The Man With Everything

bewert writes: "Heavy duty metal-ripping hardware is going up for auction on E-Bay next week. The "Son of Wyachi", winner of the Heavyweight Championship on Comedy Central's BattleBots, will be auctioned on E-Bay. The inventor, Terry Ewert, practiced on old washing machines while developing S-W's triple rotating metal meat grinder apparatus. With a 12 hp. electic motor driving three hardened tool steel meat tenderizer points spinning at 71 mph, Son of Wyachi quickly renders most objects into smoking ruins. A must have for your next Halloween bash!" Auction aside, this is a scary robot. Do not use near kids, pets, or anything you like intact.

Re:I like these types

[tzanger]

Those earlier vehicles with just two opposite rotating wheels that could only spin (and not laterally move) really sucked. They just sat there and waited for the other guy to come over and commit suicide.

You don't think this is just the same idea?

Personally these types of bots should be in a separate class -- there's no real point to trying to battle something with an impenetrable defense shield whirring around it waiting to hit anything with 10kf/p of torque. I'd classify this bot as purely defense. It can run around and defend. There's no real offensive tactic involved (spin up the rotor and attack? Please...)

I agree with some of the other posters -- the UK television show where the robots had to have good offense, defense and manouvre abilities was best. This show is simply "make it last and try to hurt the other guy" -- bo-ring.

Re:Production values seriously lacking

[Psychotext]

I have to seriously disagree on this point. Having watched pretty much all of the "robot" shows from all over the world I find that I cannot bear to watch "battlebots". Maybe it is that it has the WWF feeling that the short attention spanned Americans enjoy, but I'm more interested in the technology than some drooling & past it sports correspondant working alongside a dumb blonde that couldn't tell the difference between a cafe latte and a capacitor.

However, I agree about the need for more interesting weapons. Then again, when you think that these robots are paid for by the people who build them, how many of them do you think would be happy to have them torn to pieces?

Then again, my favourite bot so far has been one called hypnodisc (Check the UK robot wars website).

Auction not so cool.

[Penrif]

Yikes. That sure is a $25,000 auction. Massivly over-priced if you ask me... What are the uses for such a machine? 'Bout all I can think of is silly destructive weekend adventures (can be done for cheaper), and competing in BattleBots. However, with this handy clause from the Auction Page [ebay.com]:

This offer does not include rights to the name, ranking or image of the bot, therefore it cannot be entered into any future BattleBots competitions.

That kinda takes the competition thing away. But that begs the question, why are the auctioning it, and not competing it next season? I'm taking a guess here, but here's a quote from their FAQ [teamwhyachi.com]:

5) Why build a walking bot?

The rules for Treasure Island allowed walking bots to be 50% heavier than the wheeled bots in each weight class. If you can design and build a walking bot that is maneuverable and somewhat fast, without adding much weight for the walking assemblies, you end up with extra weight for motors, batteries, and weapons.

...

7) Now that BattleBots changed the walking rules for the next competition what's next?

We were in favor of changing the rules so that there is no weight advantage for a walking bot. The cost of building a competitive walking bot is very high. We have a new design that uses wheels which will be much more destructive.

So, there you are...recouping costs on a robot they can't compete with next time anyway. I'm a bit disillusioned with Whyachi now...it's walker really didn't work all that well, but it gave 'em an extra 50% of weight. I wonder what the bonus is for a bot that doesn't move at all...(a valid strategy for a spinner like Whyachi)

Re:These aren't robots

[Brian_Ellenberger]

The Mars rovers have several decades of AI in them. The amount of time it takes for a signal to get from Earth to Mars is way too long for NASA engineers to be able to run the rovers around realtime. By the time they would get the signal that the robot was about to crash into a big rock, the robot would have already crashed. So they used behavior-based robotics research pioneered by Rodney Brooks at MIT to deal with the low-level don't-kill-yourself AI and then gave the robot highlevel mission parameters. Basically NASA told the robot to go to (x,y) and the robot got there without killing itself.

One paper you might want to look at is Fuzzy Behavior-based Navigation for Planetary Microrovers. I found an abstract here: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/1415.html