Dale's Homemade Robots

Omega Force

June 2005

Coming soon to Dragon*Con Robot Battles

• 6 wheel Drive
• Invertable articulating chassis with high ground clearence
• Powerful electric rotary flipper

June 20 update: Click here for rotary flipper details.

Omega Force under construction July 18 2005

This project has been put on indefinite hold as of July 21 2005. Several performance issues have surfaced after initial testing. One major problem is weight. The bot weighs 11 pounds, 13 ounces and still needs several panels to protect electronics. Finishing it under 12 pounds will take a lot of work. The 1900 mah batteries are only good for about 5 minutes on a charge. I'd like to see twice that. The weapon works well only if it can get a bite on the opponent. Unfortunately getting a good bite is difficult even on my stationary test object, a dot matrix printer. Also, the upper wedge interferes with flipping. To be effective only one wedge can be used making invertability moot.

This bot suffered from too many cool but untested ideas being tried at once. I learned a lot from making it including how to implement 6 wheel drive and good gear boxes. This knowledge will be applied to the bot I will bring to DragonCon in September. I only have a month to complete the new bot, hopefully I'll finish in time.

Plan B

My "Plan B" bot will be non-invertable 6 wheel drive with a self-righting mechanism. The weapon is a pure electric flipper/lifter and will serve 4 functions; flipping, lifting, raising the wedge for obstacles, and self-righting. There will soon be another web page for plan b. All I have to show at this time is this video of the proof of concept electric flipper (RealPlayer format, 750k). Click here.