Today begins the build of the antweight Twisted Nipplenuts, inspired by Gabriel from the Robot Wars TV show (and live tours from Xtreme Robots) and Kryten from Red Dwarf. Using some recycled materials, some sound expert advice and some novel ideas I will set about building my antweight, from my own room in Yorkshire. Yup, prepare to lose your aitches, say “‘ey up like” and have some Henderson’s Relish ’cause Twisted Nipplenuts will be a Yorkshire bot!

There will be five parts to this build:

1. The design philosophy/project design
2. The armour/chassis and weapon
3. The electrics
4. The wheels
5. Testing

Today is the design philosophy. I want an antweight because it is relatively simple and cheap to make. Also I want to take part in antweight fights, as I will be based near RoboDojo for the foreseeable future and will be at the next AWS (pending build time). However, anyone can make an antweight using a 3D printer or purchase some bits for an antweight between £50-£200.  However I want to be as environmentally friendly as possible. To achieve this I want to source offcuts if I can and not use a 3D printer where possible. This means the Twisted Nipplenuts will be made from materials normally classified as waste, for example the armour could come from offcuts of plastic, as the total area for the armour and wheels will come to no more than 100cm squared (actually it works out somewhere about 75cm squared for Twisted Nipplenuts, which sounds quite a lot but it comes into my design philosophy in the next paragraph). 

The next thing about the antweight is to make it look as different as possible. They all look so similar, mostly as rambots or spinners. there is the odd walker antweight but I want something that looks truly unique, something that pushes boundaries. Looking at other robots for inspiration, I like the look of Gabriel from the Robot Wars series, and having met the driver personally, I am in awe of him and his team. So I have gone for a blatant copy of Gabriel, with some changes to the weapon to make it deliberately uneven. So this means (say it like they do in Battlebots) HUGE wheels, that will be right on the edge of the size limit in terms of diameter, although quite thin to accommodate the chassis. The weapon is more of an open-ended problem, as it is limited to the constraints of the antweight limits, even more so than the wheels! To start with I will have a static weapon, some kind of spike or maybe even a fancy static scoop but if the weight restrictions permit, I would love to add an active spinning flail to the body to truly live up to the name. Speaking of which…

The name came about from a conversation about an unique name that would be intentionally difficult for the announcer at Antweight events to keep a straight face while saying but also memorable. A little while after the event, I started talking about some obscure thing about the Red Dwarf universe, whereby the quote of “twist my nipplenuts and send me to Alaska!” by Kryten. Hence the name! Something humourous and unique.

So on to a project design:

1. Design a chassis for all the electrics and can hold the massive wheels through a CAD based software. 
2. Design two versions of the main weapon, one active and one static through a CAD based software.
3. Cost up the electrics (and the other materials if necessary)
4. Scavenge for parts!
5. Purchase parts that cannot be scavenged (with advice from ARC Robotics).
6. Build Twisted Nipplenuts and test.

So there we have it! Next time, I begin my build in time for the next Antweight event.