Team Employee of the Month

Thank you for visiting the website of Team Employee of the Month. Everyone on the team are seniors in the Aerospace Engineering Program at Olathe Northwest. Together we are making a battlebot to compete in the Bots IQ competition. The basic design of our Robot is a Pneumatic flipper which utilizes a four bar linkage system to maximize the effectiveness of its lifting power.

The robot name "Spatha" comes from a greek word meaning broad sword. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor Click here. Otherwise, if you have any comments, please feel free to Contact us.

We first arrived at the Miami Beach Convention Center on April 29th, before most battlebot teams arrived. Arriving early was great because we got through inspections with no lines or waiting. Our robot worked perfectly out of the crate. We had to drive across Miami to fill our Nitrogen tank because Bots IQ didn't get their fill station set up early enough. Wednesday, when everyone else was performing safety checks, we were at the beach!

We arrived early in the morning to charge our batteries and get ready for battle. Team Raven Rampage was the third match in the morning. On contact with the opponent, their pinning weapon which was made out of delrin shattered. They lost the match but luckily they could repair their robot because they brought a replacement for their weapon. Our team had a bye the first round which meant that we had to wait until second round to fight. Late at night, we competed against a double-sided wedge-bot. On initial contact a wire broke loose, hindering our drive system. We were able to toss our opponent in the air but due to their double-sided design, they were still functional. With our drive disabled, we were pushed into the corner and pummeled with the hammer 18 times before tapping out. This was a disappointing loss but it just made us come back and fight a little bit harder with vengeance!

We discovered that we would face the winner of Raven Rampage's next match. Unfortunately, their spinning weapon failed again and the other robot advanced to face our team. Our pneumatic flipper dominated the match as we flipped them over five times and finished our opponent off by sticking them into the wall.

Excited from our previous victory, we were optimistic about our next match. In the next match, we chased down our opponent as they tried to run away and not expose the robot's sides. Once we got underneath them, will flipped them over in one throw and immobilized their robot. Later that night we had another battle against a wedge-bot. Ironically their wedge could not get underneath our robot which gave us the advantage. We were able to lift their robot up and push it around but because of their wide base, we were unable to flip it completely over. We lost by a controversial split judges decision which placed us at 13th place out of the 44 teams.

We would like to thank our sponsors for all of their help with our robot. With the help of Express Scale Parts, we were able to use a water jet to cut our weapon parts out of 3/8" aluminum. This allowed us to accurately cut the intricate pieces as well as holes that are designed to reduce weight. Batteries Plus offered to test our batteries in order to optimize their ampere-hour capacity. Bad cells were discovered in some of the battery packs so these were replaced and then the new sets were repacked.

Click here to access our 3d content courtesy of Solidworks. They have a system that publishes 3d files in a website and can be rotated by the click of a mouse. There is no password so just click Login when the screen loads. Please note that this will not work with all computer systems. A Flash plug-in may be needed in order for this to work.

These are the commands to modify the viewpoint:

• To rotate - Drag your mouse in the graphics area.
• To Pan - Hold down the Shift key and drag your mouse in the graphics area, or hold down both the right and left mouse button.
• To Zoom - Hold down the Ctrl key and drag your mouse in the graphics area, or hold down the right mouse button.