To be selected for the challenge the teams' robots had to demonstrate their ability to operate independently and map their surroundings digitally.Īustralia's Acting Chief Defence Scientist Dr Warren Harch says the six teams are at the forefront of robotics technology. Twenty-three teams from five countries submitted entries and competition officials chose 12 teams for the semi-finals, which was then narrowed down to six. Team Magician will compete against five others from Turkey, Japan and the United States at the Multi-Autonomous Ground-robotics International Challenge (MAGIC) in Adelaide in November. These interconnect solutions are ideally for bots and similar applications.An Australian team is one of six through to the finals of an international challenge to develop the next generation of fully autonomous battlefield robots. Stay tuned to the Samtec blog for further updates on Aegis and BattleBots! Also, check out our latest Micro Rugged Solutions Guide. Follow them on Instagram or their website. Our goal is to establish ourselves as a serious contender by inflicting as much damage as possible! ? For More Informationĭespite coronavirus delays, the Phalanx Robotics team continues to develop the Aegis robot. Standard strategy for flipper bots applies to us: keep to the fight at the perimeter of the BattleBox to provide protection and increase our chance of launching competitors out of the arena. With that being said, our goal is to win as many fights as possible while sustaining as little damage as we can. Some of the competition have been fighting robots since we were still in diapers! As a rookie team, we expect the competition to be a huge learning experience. The COVID-19 outbreak turned every aspect of the tournament on its head. MB: Thanks for that! What are your goals for the upcoming competition?ĪG: This will be the strangest BattleBots tournament in history. Our custom-designed PCBs for Aegis do incorporate lots of Samtec manufactured components. They helped us with the aesthetic design of Aegis and helped to support us financially. Samtec has given us access to the Maker13 workspace and donated a lot of electronic components. BattleBots is in no way a profitable as most teams end up in the red. MB: What roles do sponsors like Samtec play in the bot-building process?ĪG: I’m not sure it would have been possible for our team to build Aegis and compete if it weren’t for sponsors like Samtec, Fibre Glast, WCI and Owings Patterns. You never know what an innovative team may bring to a fight! Of course, there are many combinations of weapons bots can have: flying drones to distract the opponent, multibot setups, flamethrowers, etc.! Plus, there are weapon types I didn’t even mention here. Finally, flipper bots (my biased personal favorite!) throw the opponent out of the arena or high in the air to cause substantial damage on impact. Other heavier bots use stationary spinning weapons to transfer as much destructive energy to their opponent as possible. Some bots will have overhead weapons like hammers, spear, or spinning disc. You’ll find bots using wedges, lifters, or grabbers to maintain control of the fights while using their opponents’ weapons against them. No acid, napalm, high explosives, EMP’s, smoke screens, or entanglement devices are allowed. Key design concerns are participant safety and maintaining BattleBox integrity. Matt Burns: Briefly, what are some of the other more popular styles or designs of BattleBots?Īndrew Godfrey: I love how open the BattleBots rules are. In this next portion of the interview, Andrew Godfrey from Phalanx adds more detail on that process. In a previous post, the Samtec blog team interviewed the team at Phalanx Robotics in their quest to win BattleBots in 2020.