AWS67 Event Report
| AWS 67 Event Report | |
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| Primary Contact | Steve Barnett |
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I made a solo jaunt down to Gloucester at the end of April for Antweight World Series 67 (AWS67) with my robots Big Loader and Time for Crab.
AWS is a long running antweight tournament and has run about 3 times a year since it started in 1999.
The tournament started slightly late due to some necessary fettling of the arena, leaving plenty of time to get my robots out and ready, and apply acetate to any wedge like surfaces to try and maximise ground game.
I had the usual pre-tech check nerves, but all for nothing as both robots came in at about 145g, leaving plenty of headroom under the 150g limit and fitted the box with no problems. This was a nice contrast with Ant Freeze 9 where I was forced to borrow a dremel to hack the front off of Time for Crab's claws to fit it in the box. Big Loader could do with some minor tweaks for future events as the slightly flexible PCB pontoons the tracks are mounted on can spring out slightly, but it passed the box test regardless.
Tournament Start
AWS is a double elimination format, so when a robot loses its first fight it moves into a second loser's bracket. At the end of the tournament the top two from each group's winners bracket and the top two from each group's losers bracket go into a final stage which is also double elimination. At the end the top robot in the winners bracket fights the top robot from that stage's losers bracket. For the final the winner of the winners bracket fights the winner of the loser's bracket, if the robot from the losers bracket wins this final there is a rematch such that the winning robot needs to lose twice before being eliminated.
With about 80 robots present there were 4 groups of 21 robots (with a couple of placeholders), with Big Loader ending up in Group B and Time for Crab in Group C.
The titles below are timestamped YouTube links.
Big Loader vs XPC
My first fight of the day was Big Loader vs XPC, who I was sharing a pit table with. After a while of running circles around each other failing to get any purchase I was able to get XPC in Big Loader's scoop and push it to the corner. It was able to briefly break free, but developed some drive issues allowing Big Loader to push it into one of the drop out zones for the first victory of the day.
Time for Crab vs Qrybaby
Time for Crab's first fight was against Qrybaby, a vertical spinner. I was a little nervous facing a spinner as my robots are printed in PLA Plus and not super robust, but fortunately I was able to use the claws to keep the spinner at bay for the most part. I got flipped several times, and went for a strategy of using the opponent's spinner to right myself instead of trying to drive inverted for extended periods. I managed to get several decent grabs with the claws, mostly avoiding the spinner, though in one of these grabs the spinner took a chunk out of the inside of the claw without causing any loss of functionality.
I eventually managed a grab in a position where I could push Qrybaby to the drop out zone and release it. It promptly bounced back in, but not before touching the bottom of the drop out zone so this was a victory for Time for Crab.
There was a small amount of damage on Time for Crab after this fight. The chassis had some cosmetic scratches and there was a chunk missing from a claw which I decided to leave as it was (ominous foreshadowing). I had to replace the gearbox cover which was damaged and pulled off during the fight. Qrybaby was also able to nibble away at the brass claw leadscrew leaving a section of thread that was unusable. I decided to adjust for this this by offsetting the other side of the mechanism so that the damaged bit of thread would not be used instead of replacing the leadscrew. It reduced the claw travel slightly, but not in a way that took it outside of the 4 inch cube limit.
Big Loader vs Dissector
Big Loader's second opponent was a Dissector, a nasty looking hammer saw with a