Agent Colson: The combat robot that's mostly wheel
Agent Colson is a continuation of 6" Colson wheel based robots started by Jamo and Colson Bot.
Expected
Result
The robot is as simple as it gets. All the components strapped to an aluminum plate. A pair of Pololu/Sanyo 10:1 micro gearmotors pushes this thing at 5 ft/s. A 26 x 28 mm brushless spins the Colson wheel, though it is a touch underpowered. A pair of vextrollers (Vex Motor Controller 29) move the drive motors.
The Colson wheel itself is hollowed out on the lathe and the rotor of the motor pressed into it.
So much swarf.
So many voids
The two halves are held together only by the magnetism within the two sections of the brushless motor. It works okay, only coming apart during significant impact. In the spinup test video below, Youtube chopped and clipped the audio to hell, so mute the video for your ears.
PA Bot Blast
Meeting colsonbot
Agent Colson took a beating during PA Bot Blast 2013 (but is still alive?). During its first match with the Weta clone Mondo Bizarro, it was beat on until it flew apart into two halves.
Reassembled, but only slightly dented.
Then it was experimented on with Final Exam to see how hard Final Exam hits.
Final Exam hits hard when given the chance.
In the end, all the hot glue holding everything together came off, the brushless controller died, and a drive motor disassembled itself.
It was really fun though. Maybe I'll fix it up with a bigger drive motor for Dragoncon (but not really).
