Alex Wait (left), Mathias Ramirez (middle) and Nick Sivertson discuss their “Battlebot” design at the Pima Community College manufacturing lab.

 Vic Verbalaitis, El Inde Arizona

Nick Sivertson groaned as he set the cardboard box on the workshop desk.

The box cradled two 20-pound slabs of ballistic steel, sturdy enough to stop a bullet in its tracks.

Beside the box, wires weaved in between motors and batteries laid out on a strip of wood. A transmitter, which looks somewhat like a video game controller, accompanied the array on the table.

As the team gathered their materials on a Saturday morning, their grins only grew brighter.

Some of them had always dreamed of building a battle robot capable of pure devastation.

A palpable aura of excitement emanates from around the workshop table. Sivertson and the five other University of Arizona seniors laugh and joke about the Herculean task before them.

After 19 design iterations in computer-aided design software, or CAD, they are finally ready to bring their dream to life.

Their eyes are set on the biggest global arena in robotics: “Battlebots.”

The six UA College of Engineering students are constructing a 250-pound battle robot to compete on the “Battlebots” television show as a part of their senior capstone project.

The “Battlebots” competition features one-on-one bouts between massive, complex robots capable of causing serious destruction. The robots clash wheel-to-wheel inside the Battlebox, a perilous arena replete with automated hammers, spinning saws and powerful pinball-esque paddles, centered in Caesars Entertainment Studios in Las Vegas.

Given three minutes in the ring, two Battlebots operated by opposing teams try to cause as much damage as possible to their competitor. The bots feature weapons systems that they use to impair their opponents, with some of the more popular weapon types including flippers, flamethrowers and horizontal or vertical spinners that can rotate at hundreds of miles per hour.

Sivertson said that he and two other team members, Al Hurworth and Mathias Ramirez, birthed the idea in response to a lack of variety in past senior design assignments. As former members of the Baja SAE team, a design project where engineering students construct a Baja-style off-road racing car, the three decided they wanted to do something new and unique for their project.

“I think we all wanted to build something that was different than what we’ve done before,” Sivertson said. “So when the opportunity came up to build a robot, and build a robot of this scale, too, I was all in on it.”

After pitching their idea to the dean, they received an enthusiastic approval, allowing them to begin working on their idea.

The “Battlebots” competition is no stranger to college students entering the ring; the show has featured robots from student robotics teams at the University of California at Berkeley, MIT and the Rochester Institute of Technology, among others.

The UA Battlebot team’s six members include Sivertson as the project lead, Hurworth helping with leadership and project guidance, Ramirez overseeing the CAD design and robotics process, Yousuf Choudhary as the software lead, Karson Knudson as the safety and electrical systems lead, and Alex Wait as the weapons lead.

Materials for the build of the Sting “Battlebot” sit on a workshop table at the Pima Community College manufacturing lab.

The team’s bot is named Sting, and its creative design reflects that of a mechanical stingray. Sivertson said when he was around 7 years old, he was feeding stingrays in the Bahamas when one sucked his arm all the way up to his shoulder; he said he thinks the stingray mistook his thumb for a shrimp.

“It didn’t hurt, it just felt like a vacuum,” Sivertson said. “I’ve always kind of kept that lowkey, but that’s why I’ve always loved the design because I have that fond memory.”

The design of the Sting bot has changed many times throughout the team’s months-long process, with almost 20 design iterations so far. One early build of the bot came in at 380 pounds and had to be scrapped to fit the Battlebots heavyweight division requirement of 250 pounds.

The team’s current design of Sting meets the weight requirement and features a vertical spinner weapon. Sivertson said Sting’s vertical spinner tip speed is estimated to travel at 250 mph, capable of inflicting devastating damage to any opposing bots.

“That’s what everybody wants to watch,” Hurworth said. “When they’re watching ‘Battlebots,’ they don’t want to watch like a grabber or something. We want to make sure that we’re putting on a show, too.”

Making their mark

To connect with the senior design project idea, Hurworth spearheaded the creation of the Robotics Club at the UA during the fall. The club sponsors smaller Battlebot projects in addition to the heavyweight senior project, with two bots in the creation process: Gila and Buzzkill at 12 pounds and 3 pounds, respectively.

“One of the big things about the project is that we wanted to build a Battlebot, but at the same time, we wanted to leave a lasting thing at the university,” Hurworth said. “I really wanted to make sure that other students coming in that are interested in robotics have the opportunity to learn and grow.”

Each team member’s role is integral to the success of the bot’s design, and for acceptance into Battlebots, every single component must be up to code. Submitting a bot to the competition requires a full CAD design, as well as passing rigorous safety standards.

Ramirez heads the 3D modeling process in CAD, and also directs a lot of the robotics work as a whole. Ramirez has the most experience in robotics out of the team, even starting the VEX Robotics Club when he attended Empire High School in Tucson’s Vail School District.

Ramirez ensures that all of the sketches the team creates are able to be designed effectively in CAD, and said that a big challenge is modeling everything to be at the correct scale.

As an inveterate “Battlebots” fan, Ramirez said he is excited at the opportunity to participate in a competition that has been so important to him.

“It’s really a dream come true to have the support to build a Battlebot as a part of a class that I have to do anyway,” Ramirez said. “It feels a little bit like a cheat code to work with friends on something that you want to do anyways. It’s a lot of fun.”

Knudson, who majors in electrical computer engineering, statistics and data science, oversees both the electrical systems and safety standards of the Sting bot.

The Sting "Battlebot" design rendering in CAD.

“There’s many different layers of making sure that when this bot is not supposed to have power and not supposed to be moving, then it doesn’t have it,” Knudson said.

Choudhary, the software systems lead for the project, works on coding the telemetry system for Sting. The telemetry system allows the team to analyze Sting’s motor speeds and temperatures in real-time, so they can make quick strategic adjustments during a fight.

Choudhary also handles the programming for a drone robot, currently named Jellyfish, that will fly above the arena to track and follow the opposing bot and provide a bird’s eye view feed of the fight. Choudhary said having this extra layer of real-time reconnaissance can allow the Sting team to better predict what their competitor might do next inside the ring during a match.

In addition to being the weapons lead, Wait, a mechanical engineering major, also is in charge of fundraising and ordering materials. The trio raised more than $45,000 for the project from sponsors to cover the costs of building several bots and developing the Robotics Club.

The project has received money from various company sponsors, which help finance the project in exchange for advertising placement on the robot. Some company sponsors have also offered discounted prices to the team for using their products in the build model of Sting.

After completing their application to the “Battlebots” show in February, Hurworth said the team was contacted by one of the producers in March. Hurworth said the producer liked their application, but asked that they add a flamethrower to their design. Hurworth also said the producer invited the team to compete in an exhibition match during the “Battlebots Destruct-A-Thon” series in Las Vegas during May.

With their CAD design complete, and a working build of Sting expected to be completed by the end of March, the team intends to unveil their battle robot to fellow engineering students at the College of Engineering’s Craig M. Berge Design Day on May 1. After they fight in the “Destruct-A-Thon,” they hope Sting will be accepted to compete in the Battlebots World Championship VIII season taking place this summer.

“It’s our dream, and we’re going to go and make it happen together,” Choudhary said. “And it’s going to be very exciting to see.”

Fun facts

In the span of a three-minute Battlebots match at peak power, the Sting bot’s drive operates at about 100 amps – equivalent to powering five households.

The Sting bot is designed to travel at around 20 mph, but its vertical spinner’s tip speed is estimated to be around 250 mph.

The University of Arizona Robotics club is open to everyone, and any students interested in building “Battlebots” can join. The club hopes to build more robots and host fights at the UA, making it into a popular sporting event among the student population.

This might not look like much, but it could be the future of surgery and cancer treatment. This is what its designers call F3DB, a 3D bioprinter that uses bio-ink to repair the body’s organs, but it can do so from inside the body. Conventional bioprinting must first be done outside the body, then relying on invasive surgery to get whatever has been printed to where it needs to go. This method involves long recovery times, blood loss, chance for infection, you name it.

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