moverstreet's Blog

I think that the biggest surprise at Robogames 2008 was that the RoboPhilo got a silver metal in the light weight division of Kung-Fu! The question I will try to answer is how. If you look at the tell of the tape, the RoboPhilo should have been in trouble. It was a 4 hundred dollar robot going up against thousand dollar robots. Low torque analog servo vs. digital robotic servo’s. Light weight plastic frame vs. metal framed robots. So how did the Robobrothers do it? Yes they had luck and good match ups for them but. One of the keys was the scoring system at Robogames. If your robot fell down with out being touched that was a point for the other robot. The RobPhilo has a low center of gravity and very large feet. So not only is it hard to knock down, it is a very stable humanoid. The Korea Robots have the same setup. So the strategy is to wait out you’re opponent. Let them make the first mistake and fell down. Get up by a few points and then stay alway from them. I think that that is a huge flaw in the scoring system at Robogames. I hope that they fix that problem next year. My other answer is to look at the servos. The problem or not an advantage for the other robots was the speed of the digital servos vs. the speed of the RoboPhilo’s analog servos. One of the biggest problems with the Robonova-1 is that the Hitec robotic servos are not fast enough. Their design is getting old and it looks like Hitec is not looking to improve that anytime in the near future! There you have it. Those are my thoughts on the how the RoboPhilo won a silver metal in Kung-fu. The interesting thing is that the Korea’s design strategy is; low center of gravity, large feet, heavy robot with fast high torque servos. That sounds like a winning strategy to me! But for us mortals a 4 hundred dollar robot may be the best bet in a light weight Kung-Fu match!