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Overview
This is the definitive guide to designing and building warrior robots like those seen on BattleBots, Robotica, and Robot Wars. It walks robot enthusiasts of all ages step-by-step through the design and building process, enabling them to create any number of customized warrior robots. With a strong emphasis on safety, chapters include designing a robot, choosing materials, radio control systems, electric motors, robot batteries, motor speed controllers, gasoline engines, and drive trains. Clear instructions are accompanied by photos, line drawings, and detailed diagrams throughout. A color section showcases a variety of glorious fighting machines. For beginners, there is machine shop 101 and robot physics, and, of course, chapters on weaponry that include spinner robots, thwackbots, cutting blade robots, lifters, and chameleon robots. When the bot of their dreams is built, suggestions on where to compete and game-day strategies and tactics help readers take the next step. An extensive resource section lists parts suppliers, pertinent Web sites, a radio frequency chart, and a glossary.
Synopsis
This is the definitive guide to designing and building warrior robots like those seen on BattleBots, Robotica, and Robot Wars. It walks robot enthusiasts of all ages step-by-step through the design and building process, enabling them to create any number of customized warrior robots. With a strong emphasis on safety, chapters include designing a robot, choosing materials, radio control systems, electric motors, robot batteries, motor speed controllers, gasoline engines, and drive trains. Clear instructions are accompanied by photos, line drawings, and detailed diagrams throughout. A color section showcases a variety of glorious fighting machines. For beginners, there is machine shop 101 and robot physics, and, of course, chapters on weaponry that include spinner robots, thwackbots, cutting blade robots, lifters, and chameleon robots. When the bot of their dreams is built, suggestions on where to compete and game-day strategies and tactics help readers take the next step. An extensive resource section lists parts suppliers, pertinent Web sites, a radio frequency chart, and a glossary.
USA Today
For anyone who wants in on the metal mayhem.
Editorials
Boston Herald
For techie teens looking to tweak their talents during winter vacation, search no further.Gannett News Service
For anyone who wants in on the metal mayhem, Gurstelle's manual collects and organizes advice now scattered over the Internet.New Haven Register
Gurstelle clearly gets a big kick out of mechanical mayhem.New Yorker
Handy how-to guide for turning your garage into a robot war zone.The New Yorker
In 1739, the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson unveiled his latest startling creation: an anatomically convincing, yet wholly mechanical, duck -- one that quacked, ate grain, and, most impressively, excreted. Vaucanson's mechanical duck was a sensation, and, as Rodney A. Brooks relates in his engaging Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, one of the celebrated early attempts to replicate -- or, at least, imitate -- life. Brooks, who showed up in the Errol Morris documentary "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," directs the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., and "Flesh and Machines" tells the odd history -- from that Enlightenment duck to Deep Blue, a computer program that famously beat Garry Kasparov at chess -- of what he calls "mankind's centuries-long quest to build artificial creatures." Recently, Brooks oversaw the development of Kismet, "the world's first robot that is truly sociable, that can interact with people on an equal basis." (Kismet has outsized eyeballs and fuzzy brows and sometimes gets lonely.) But what if, like Hal in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the sentient machines take over? Brooks argues that this can never happen, since, very soon, all of us "will become a merger between flesh and machines."It will be decades before hobbyists can build their own Kismets at home. But, as "technogeek bot builder" William Gurstelle makes clear in Building Bots, it's easy to whip up simpler, angrier creatures -- say, a sledgehammer-wielding thwack-bot. In this handy how-to guide for turning your garage into a robot war zone (think mechanical gamecocks), Gurstelle examines the growing popularity of "combat robotics," a sport that he predicts could soon "grow into another NASCAR."
(Mark Rozzo)