New York, Sept 24, 2005 - CM Robotics, Nuvation, and Freescale's brainchild of a 340 lb heavyweight combat robot, Ziggy, fights to the BattleBot semi-finals. Ziggy's titanium pneumatic flipper tosses other 340lb masses 20 feet in the air with 14,000 lbs of explosive pneumatic lifting force!
Ziggy is controlled by the new Zigbee wireless standard. Bidirectional wireless links allow weapon safeguards. Joystick inputs are packetized over Zigbee and decoded on the robot itself.
Check out frame-by-frame shots from one of the best matches of the tournament, Ziggy vs. StarHawk, taking Ziggy to the Semi-Finals.
 
 
 
 
Team member, Mark Demers, describes Ziggy's first match. "Our first match was against ShovelHead - current RFL National champ in the Super Heavy Weight (SHW) class. Pretty soon after the start of the match, we were able to get under him and with
a little push forward and a pop of the Haymaker, we were able to toss him for a
good throw across the ring and into the Lexan in front of the audience. They loved it!!! I couldn't believe it worked so well. I think it was the most impressive toss I've ever seen in the SHW class. Fun, fun, fun."
"The next robot was StarHawk, showing his teeth as his blade got spun up to speed. I was trying to avoid that blade as much as he was avoiding the Haymaker. Finally I got a line on him again and I was able to get him back into the non-threatening position on his back. At this point I left him where he laid right there in the middle of the ring and Ziggy strutted his stuff around the arena. In the count down from 10 Ziggy counted along popping the arm along with the count down. I couldn't believe how many pops I got out of the tank of air for this match. I kept firing the arm at the end in order to discharge the system and it seemed like I got about 20 full shots in total. The machine was totally dialed in and it was an incredible feeling to be able to toss around the opposing 340 lb machine like a rag-doll. What a rush!" says Demers.
CM Robotics and Nuvation have placed their four robots through a variety of competitions from New York to San Francisco, and all the bots are top ranked including BravePart and CycloneBot. |
