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From: ldnishik@wheel.ucdavis.edu (Lisa Nishikawa)
Subject: Re: Robot Wars Info
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Date: Mon, 29 Aug 1994 03:11:13 GMT
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Continuing a description of the competition -

I believe the light weight class was won by the Julie-bot. Although the 
victories were not always decisive - there was a time limit of perhaps 3 
minutes and occasionally both were still functional at the end - the 
machine which dominated (got in the most or best whacks) won. The 
Julie-bot seemed to have no technical difficulties all day and was very 
sturdy for the light weight class.

In the middle weight class, I think there were 3 machines. An inverted 
washtub painted black, wrapped with barbed wire, with a small 
rotating pair of maces on top. (I don't remember its name, but it won the 
melee event later on.) The maces were fun, but probably didn't rotate 
quickly enough and weren't heavy enough to inflict much damage.
The second machine's distinctive feature was an arm up front with flat 
blades that lay on the concrete until they found themselves under another 
vehicle. They would quickly flip the opponent and it was all over. This 
is what happened to the washtub. The washtub, incidentally, was built by 
a couple of bay area engineers and funded by Nolan Bushnell (Mr. Atari) 
who was also in attendance. The third vehicle, I think, was a small 
tracked vehicle, clearly built from scratch and quite nice. Built by a 
high school student I think.  The tracks looked like chains and rolled 
around parallelogram sides. The electronics sat inside, uncovered (very 
dangerous). It was very noisy and sounded like it had a lot of torque. 
However, on saturday, it had no reverse, and as I recall, it moved slowly 
into the corner and stayed there. I believe the machine with the flipping 
arm won this event. That approach, btw, was used on several machines, 
including the house robot, which was used in the escort competition. It 
was fairly effective on the lighter machines. The larger ones were not 
flippable.



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Lisa Nishikawa (ldnishik@wheel.ucdavis.edu)
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