Or you at least want to. The BattleBots that you see flying around the arena are purpose built machines by builders with years, sometimes decades, of experience building combat robots. You may be thinking that there is no way you could get involved, but you’d be surprised how truly easy it is to get started. BattleBots is one of those things that you can learn in a week, but take a lifetime to master. That’s why nearly every veteran builder will encourage you to start with a smaller bot and here’s why:
- Events for small bots occur more frequently and in more locations
- The cost to compete is lower (parts and event entry fees are usually much cheaper)
- Hand/Garage tools are usually all you need to build a small bot
- Small bots take less time to build
- Moving/Storing a 250 pound machine between events is not awesome
The really cool thing is the concepts you learned to build a 1 or 3 pound death machine are very very similar to building a 250 pound death machine. At the bottom of this post is a high-level description of our 1 pound bot named “Chainsaw”. The basic parts of most combat robots are similar. Our 220 pound robot uses the same transmitter/receiver as our one pound bots. It just has bigger speed controllers, gear motors, and batteries.
Team Kraken 