Counter Revolution is a heavy weight (317 lbs) battlebot that competed in the April 2009 filming of Battlebots and the 2009 RoboGames. I worked on Counter Revolution in 2009 with Curt Meyers, Derek King, Michael Gregg, and Dallas Goecker. As part of the team I designed the weapon and the support structures for the robot, I did extensive FEA to ensure that if the weapon hit anything that wasn’t a steel wall it would die. Unfortunately in our third round of RoboGames it did hit a steel wall and after doing considerable damage to the wall the weapon broke.
Below is a comparison two weapon blade designs. Each design was loaded identically on the blade surface with constraints applied at the joining points for the blade. As shown design analysis the blade on left is much better and has less deflection because of the larger radius of curvature around the blade and the slight offset from the joining to the wheel hub.
A fun and interesting comparison is the one for the support. The goal was to eliminate as much material as possible while still being able to withstand the impact from the weapon. I tried out several iterations on the support structure and come up with a very counter intuitive result (the top right).
