A retrosepective on Patch RoboWars

(ill insert the media and links at a later date)

What happens when you bring together a bunch of nerds and ask them to build robots with the sole purpose of destroying others. Well…

Aisling reached out to me back in March, telling me that the Patch RoboWars competition was going to go through and asked for my participation. We (and some others) only had a laugh about it and thought that it would be pretty cool and fun previously but I hadn’t expected for it to happen. The competition was available for Patchers (nickname for Patch members and alumni) and it was a good event to meetup and catch up with old friends.

I was super busy at the time, doing things with BrigaidNet, Enactus and going to compete in London and the sort and I made no promises of commitment to it. Eventually, I ended up joining a team with Aditya Joshi (Patch 2024), Lucy Daly (Patch 2023), and Khawaish Gulati, whom I’ve done Patch with myself back in 2022.

I had never really built a physical bot before, but I had always been interested in the idea of building one. Having some experience in engineering and building some cool things since I was much younger, I was pretty excited to put some old rusty skills to use again.

We quickly came up with the team and bot name of Le’Go. There was a few reasons why we came up with that but frankly I forgot why.

There were 2 other teams comprised of very talented and skilled Patchers.

We were given a 400€ budget per team and there was free pizza which was an incentive enough. The in person meetups for all teams was setup to be on Saturdays at Dogpatch Labs.

Initially we had 4 weeks to get together and build our bots but due to issues like some team members being leaving cert students and time spaces that Dogpatch Labs was able to host us. The competition ended up being set up for the 11th of May.

There were a plethora of rules which we unfortunately had to abide by and discussions of chemical warfare were immediately shut down. You can take a look at the rules here.

We immediately started looking at official battle bots on the internet to get some inspiration and to analyse the weaknesses and strengths of different bots and mechanisms.

I quickly decided to split up the different team members of rival teams and analysed what each of their individual strengths were. This gave us an idea of what type of bots we should be able to expect from each team. Also personal experience with everyone helped a lot.

The team and I ended up with a few ideas of what we wanted our bot to look like and after doing some janky physics simulations with a whiteboard and some pens and bottle caps. We ended up with a general consensus of what we wanted our bot to look like.

Next was coming up with what materials and mechanics we will use with the weight restrictions and rule guidelines of the project.

We ended up getting a really solid and good 11.1volt battery which was a huge relief for us, but more importantly, for Will. (He has been running around manically trying to make sure that this competition won’t end up in a physical disaster)

This is what our model ended up looking like by the 14th March.

We were struggling with coming up with the ideal flipping mechanism. We thought of Pneumatics, springs, Hydraulics, and servo motors to just name a few.

After meeting up in person again, we realised that our model had a weakness as we figured out that one of the other teams would be dangerous for us (we walked past their desk and saw some models that would’ve totally crushed ours).

That’s when we decided to make some ingenious design choices, and aptly named by other people, we ended up with a Koopa shell style bot.

We bought a bowl from Ikea, some shoe spikes from Decathlon, a few motors, wheels, an ESP32, Aditya’s PlayStation controller and started putting them together. This is what it looked like the night before thanks to Lucy’s assembly.

And in true Patch fashion, when things started breaking down at the last minute, we were able to MacGyver our way to a really sturdy bot. We realised last second that a few of our wires were exposed which would have been absolutely brutal to us but I ended up grabbing some of the used Dominos boxes and we hastily patched together a shield that went all around the base of Le’Go.

In round 1, our controller died within the first minute, leaving us with no way to control the bot. In the meantime, the uh “Peter the piss bot” team and the “Field of Blood” team had a fierce fight and with a little push from Peter the piss bot, Field of Blood fell into the hole with a broken propeller, knocking them out of the connection. Peter the piss bot soon came for Le’Go but due to the sturdiness of our bot, it was stuck in their path. It felt like someone was trying to push an unmovable object - very satisfying. Eventually, the time ran out and we left the first round with a uh tie.

Our bot’s initial hiccup didn’t dampen our mood. In round 2, we came back strong. Le’Go was knocking down walls and caused some serious damage to X. Our bot ended up breaking the internal hardware of the bot and it started to smoke from the inside. With the fears of a battery fire, we quickly halted the battle and rushed the bot outside (with adequate safety measures of course). After defusing the situation, we found that Le’Go did some serious damage.

In the end, after an amazing show of resilience by Le’Go, we did not win the competition due to a majority vote. It seems that since Peter the piss bot lasted and fought both rounds, they had more supporters. But in my eyes, Le’Go was always the true winner as the final standing bot.

The night before this competition, the northern lights was visible in Ireland and was super cool. The first time I ever saw something of the sort.

So, whilst we were readying up the bots earlier in the day, I rallied up everyone and got a few people to go up to Malahide to try and see the lights once more if it came up.

We got some snacks and drinks and had an enjoyable night at the beach.

A huge thanks to my incredible teammates, Aditya, Lucy and Khawaish, whose dedication and hard work over the past few weeks have paid off. And of course, a huge thank you to Will Donnelly, Aisling McCarthy and Patch for putting together an event that was about community as it was about competition.

Special mention to the Peter the piss bot team: Alannah, Aisling, Alex; and to the Field of Blood Team: Omar, Tim, Vedh, Will.