View this 3 pound beetleweight battlebot fight compilation where beetleweight battlebots and beetleweight combat robots fight to destruction. Just like BattleBots, these robots are in tournaments, fighting to get to the victory!
the power to weight ratios on these small bots is crazy, they just obliterate each other because they are small and fragile but their weapons are still powerful
kinda the other way around actually: they tend to absolutely obliterate eachother because they are so small and *durable* as the bots get bigger the materials they are made of are exponentially less durable proportional to the bot, this means the tiny fights have to get WAY more violent proportional to the size of the bot in order to deal damage...it also means they tend to have less durability in their connections compared to their parts so things fly off the bots more, doubly so since unlike the big ones they can actually use off the shelf parts for a lot of this which is slightly less optimal but usually comes with between 1 and 2 less zeros on the price tag (taking the white bot for example they could buy a printer buy the stock and print several sets of parts themselves for the cost of having something better custom made). where it gets really weird is the antweight bots: since some parts of physics scale exponentially and some parts scale geometrically a lot of things start to get weirdly counterintuitive and things we think of as fragile start looking very different if you look at the actual numbers. at that scale things like cardboard and pvc foam actually start making a lot of sense as structural components so builders can make the most gloriously jank thing that they can imagine with no worries. ←styrofoam has a similar total integrity per weight as titanium but instead of behaving like metal it just lets you grind bits off of it meaning that energy does not get to transfer through the structure and damage does not get to spread so once you are dealing in a small enough scale that the density of the material stops being an issue styrofoam actually legitimately beats top-end titanium for some applications and you can see a bot literally made out of chopsticks + leftover packaging materials + a cereal box with 1 piece of metal in it's structure outside of it's internal components (the wedge, because they wanted the scraping edge and rigidity) competing on even terms with bots that cost 2 grand for a half a pound of parts.
I don't know if you still do these compilations, this video is 2 years old, but the sonoran showdown beetleweight competition had professionals and some of the craziest fights I've ever seen, sp that would be a cool one to do (plus my bot did good lol)
My goal this summer is to try and build a beetle weight robot, even if it is just a wedge bot. I don't know hardly anything about robotics, but I do kinda know how to hack into rc stuff and I have lipos.
Weapon popularity definitely depends on region. When life lightens up, I'll actually design and machine my own beetleweight custom weapon and post a video on it :)
If you are looking to get into combat robotics, we would recommend the 150g kit: www.etsy.com/listing/920431649/battlebot-kit-combat-robot-kit-l?click_key=f6eafb27ca770c0b434d967b5da78259dd1f7af1%3A920431649&click_sum=43a05b66&ref=shop_home_active_10&frs=1&crt=1 or the ant weight (1lb) starter kit: www.etsy.com/listing/753628264/combat-robot-battlebot-starter-kit?click_key=3f31bf91cc5189c5be5bc580325012e576590597%3A753628264&click_sum=6179a54c&ref=related-1&frs=1
