Defensive Measures

Defensive measures are the features of the fighting robot which relate to lessening the effects of opponents robots offensive measures.

Considerations
Defensive measures often come at a cost hence its important to consider them along side your offensive measures to create your robots battle strategy. Body armour will add weight to your robot, which is good for a pushing robot as it results in more traction, but not good for a robot with a spinning blade as it will reduce its manoeuvrability and will no longer be able to direct its blows.

Additionally, its also worth considering what will happen when your robot gets damaged. Obviously you can't afford to replace everything, but perhaps a few spares of particularly important parts would be wise eg. Wheels, weapon tips, exterior panels. Hence it would also be wise to make sure you design your robot in such a way that it is easy to replace these parts, for example using reversible fixings such as nuts and bolts rather than glue.

Body armour
Body armour essentially covers areas and makes them resistant to impacts protecting whatever is underneath. Most robots will have some form of armour. Often vulnerable parts are placed as near to the centre as possible and a protective shell is put around them. Areas which are difficult to protect include the wheels and weapon. Care also needs to be taken to make sure you can still access to this core, this can be done by having a removable plate that screws into place. If using plates they should be supported on all edges to avoid bending or snapping.

Body Strength
Fighting robots will encounter many impacts in the arena, from falling into pits, being flipped in the air or shoved by other robots. You can increase your robot’s impact resistance when designing the body and chassis of the robot. Try to brace parts to ensure parts are strong in all directions.

While making your robot a solid block may be tempting, you also need to fit a lot of electronics and wires in your robot so will need to provide routes and mounting positions for these. You also have to assemble the whole thing, so ensuring access for fixing motors and running cables through the body is important.

Invertibility and Self Righting mechanisms
One common ways a robot can be defeated is if it loses traction. This can happen if the robot is flipped onto its back so its wheels no longer have grip. To avoid this situation a good feature to have on a fighting robot is to make it invertible so that whichever way to robot falls after being flipped is it’s wheels will always have grip.

If the robot cannot be made invertible, often the case if it has an axe or hammer weapon, the next best thing is a self righting mechanism. This pushes the robot back the right way up if it does end up in a vulnerable position.