Team Shock's Antweight Robots

Ant Awe 5 was our first competitive antweight built during the summer of 2008. I was based on the UK champion heavyweight robot- Iron Awe 5 and was built with permission of the team.

It was built over a period of 2 weeks with a 0.5mm thick Aluminium chassis and flipper. It was driven by to 54:1 ratio Micro Geared motors running off of a 6v Ni-Mh battery with a Barrello ant 150 speed controller. A parkflyer HPXF servo was used for the flipper as it had a good amount of power and speed.

 This version of Ant Awe 5 made its debut at RRC 15 at Robots Live Reading in 2008. It did very well and mangaged to come second in the Non Spinner combat- eventually losing to Dynamite in the final. This event did show a few flaws in the design though.

Firstly the robot was incredibly slow and overweight since 2 batteries were needed to run the motors. The flipper was also too weak and kept flexing when flipping other robots.

So two new motors were purchased which were considerably faster and meant that only one battery was needed. A new flipper arm was made and Ant Awe was ready to fight again- this time weighing a nice 147g!

 This version lasted very well but eventually a whole years worth of Live Events took its toll and the chassis was bent and battered out of all recognition.

Since the old version of Ant Awe 5 was starting to wear out, I decided to make a brand new version. This version had a brand new chassis design so that the entire shell could be removed to make maintenance easier. The new shell was made from 0.5mm Aluminium with a 1mm flipper arm all mounted onto a 2mm HDPE base plate. The drive system remained the same but was now powered by a 180mAh 2 cell LiPo which gave a nice increase in speed and power. The flipper was still powered by the same HPXF servo running at 5v. This version has been in action since the summer of 2009 and is still going strong under the control of Matt.