Battlebot: Overbearing
Overbearing was my first combat robot and also my senior project at Cal Poly. It competed in two BattleBots tournaments before being retired.
As I’ve oft said, I feel that I learned more during the course of this project than over the entirety of my “structured education” in college. It taught me that problems do not always have a neat textbook solution. In fact, I found that they usually don’t. It taught me to be resourceful and flexible and that sometimes you just have to make stuff up as you go along without putting the amount of engineering into it that you would have liked. I also learned an amazing deal about how “the world works” in that I had to deal with sourcing parts and defining budgets and talking to people. Oh, there were so many people to talk to - not part of my natural skill set. In the end of it all though, my team came up with a competitive design to a very unique challenge. In fact, I believe that to this day, there aren’t any other fully invertible horizontal spinners out there.
More info and some nice professional pics are available on the BattleBots website.