The Brooks Family
Autonomous Sumobots
and friends By Rick Brooks
Updates:
6-25-08 The video of ExSpurt's win at the May 1, 2008 Third Mini-Sumo Robotics Challenge at the University of Northern Iowa is now available. The video is three hours. Since this is a mail-in contest I've included ExSpurt's instructions for the local helper. On May 3, 2008, ExSpurt won the Spring Chibotica 2008 Mini Sumo event. At that contest, a new robot, Extra Parts, won the Racing Line Following event.
3-30-08 Add video from BOT BRAWL 2008. I had car problems and missed the mini sumo, plus there was a William Morris exhibit at the museum, so my videographer went missing for a long time.
Email comments to BrooksBots
After
finishing Executioner, mini sumo was the only class that hadn't been
invaded by a BrooksBots. So
ExSpurt was hatched in a flurry of
activity during November and December, 2006.
ExSpurt
won the mini sumo division of the
2007 NEIRG and
2007 Central Illinois Bot Brawl.
Also included are separate pages on
ExSpurt Tires and
ExSpurt Strategy.
Using
technology from
Extrasensory, a new 3 Kg sumo was
built.
Executioner was designed for maximum
speed and power using R/C car motors. Many initial bugs resulted
in a third place finish at the
CIRC 2006 event. A touch screen
LCD was added for user input.
Work
is continuing on
Extrasensory...installing
an optical mouse in a Sumo robot. Problems with the first chassis required a complete
rebuild as detailed in
Extrasensory II
. In the revised
configuration, Extrasensory won NEIRG 2006 adult light and
CIRC 2006 1 Kg competitions.
Rich's
wall following robot won the
RI/SME and
Ohio Tech Robotics
non-tactile maze in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. The same chassis
was modified for line following and became
Expressway.
Because Expy missed the finish stop on it's first run, it finished third
at the 2005
NEIRG event. It went on to win the 2006 NEIRG line
following.
After
the
February, 2004 NEIRG,
Excuse
was converted to a real heavyweight Sumo with much larger motors, more
batteries, and revised control circuitry. The result was a robot
with substantially improved performance. After winning the August,
2004, NEIRG,
Excuse II was
again modified with a kill switch and revised rear suspension. In
this configuration, Excuse won the Heavyweight Autonomous Sumo class at
the 2004 CIRC Competition, won the 2006 NEIRG adult heavyweight event,
and took second at
2006 CIRC.
As
a high school senior engineering design project, RIch built a
75
Pound Sumo. It is identical to
Flaming P'nut only half the weight and twice the power.
The goal of
Excuse
was to replace Exhume with a new three pound robot that did not use
servo motors/gear trains for drive. Lynxmotion motors were used, but
the basic configuration and materials from Exhume were utilized.
Excuse was
also the first attempt to incorporate an optical mouse into a sumo
robot. Although several pounds underweight, Excuse won the
February, 2004 Adult Heavyweight Sumo
NEIRG events.
When Sumo Robots became too serious, Rick created
Expendable out of that original Sumo. Even though it was one
third the weight of the competition, Expendable finished in third place
out of 6 heavyweight Sumos in the
August, 2003, NEIRG competition.
Expendable was retired from competition after that event.
Rick’s original Sumo,
Runt, was built during the summer of 2001. Runt’s
extruded aluminum chassis proved too heavy and eventually crumbled on
the drill press during the final weight reduction attempt. Runt’s parts
were reassembled on a carbon fiber chassis and
Exhume was born. Runt and Exhume
have won seven consecutive the Adult Lightweight Sumo
NEIRG events and the 2004 CIRC
Competition Lightweight Autonomous Sumo class. Exhume's only non
win was a second behind
Extrasensory at the
CIRC 2006 event.
For the Lego class, Brendan built
Mighty Man.
Mighty Man finished second in the
August, 2002, NEIRG. Mighty Man
went on to compete in the February and August, 2003, NEIRG. Mighty
Man was dusted off for the
CIRC 2006 competition were it ended up
in second place.
Rich built
Sticky
after seeing the
Lynxmotion Sumo
robot
kits. Sticky won the combined Heavyweight Sumo at the August,
2002, and the High School Heavyweight Sumo at the
February, 2003, NEIRG. Sticky then finished second in
the Open Heavyweight August, 2003, NEIRG, and second in the High
School Heavyweight at the February, 2004, NEIRG. With a stand-in
operator, Sticky took third in the Open Heavyweight Sumo at the August,
2004, NEIRG. 
The Indiana Tech Explorer Post had a very successful
RI/SME Sumo
program that was changing format. During 2002 Rick and Rich helped with
the IR sensors,
Parallax BS2SX control, and H bridge motor drives. The
Sumo was called the
Flaming P’nut.
The Flaming P'nut smoked a motor control in the 2002 RI/SME competition.
With new motor drivers Flaming P'nut won the 2003 RI/SME and the
2004 Ohio
Tech Robotics and Technology Invitational event.
Early Sumo matches showed the need for a reliable, repeatable method of measuring “push”. The Exert-O’Meter was developed to meet this need. More details yet to come.