Inspiring Young Engineers with BattleBots and SOLIDWORKS

Many top BattleBots fighting robot teams use SOLIDWORKS such as BiteForce, HyperShock, Witch Doctor, and SawBlaze. All of these team leaders became interested at an early age in engineering, robotics design, and building competitive combat robots. They are also alike in their preference for the ease of use and range of design and engineering tools of SOLIDWORKS^® for developing robots for BattleBots and inspiring young people to get involved in engineering through competitive robotics.

However, the team leaders use SOLIDWORKS in different ways.

Paul Ventimiglia, captain of four-time BattleBots champion Team BiteForce, became interested in robotics because he wanted to build animatronics for movie special effects like those in “Jurassic Park,” “Star Wars,” and “The Terminator.” These days Ventimiglia helps inspire young robotics designers and engineers through volunteer work as a mentor to FIRST^® Robotics teams.

“It’s a great program in terms of competition, robotics, and using engineering in a competitive way. I think it’s a great way to learn a lot really quickly and teach a really broad spectrum of skills in terms of design and brainstorming, initially doing detailed work, in SOLIDWORKS, for example ... and then actually getting those parts made by yourself, and by external shops all within days, and not months, and then testing out your ideas,” Ventimiglia says.

The BattleBots schedule allows teams roughly a month to complete design work for production deadlines. The members of Team HyperShock are thousands of miles apart, and their concurrent and collaborative design work happens in the evenings and on weekends. SOLIDWORKS enables them to quickly conduct numerous design iterations to complete their robot in a compressed time frame.

Team HyperShock Captain Will Bales explains, “We can push our production deadlines out and literally iterate right up to the very last minute, which definitely gives us an edge.” In addition, because SOLIDWORKS is an industry-standard data format, the team minimizes delays in production and assembly. Bales also emphasizes that SOLIDWORKS Visualize rendering capabilities allow them to improve their robot’s unique appearance, an important feature for the team.
 

In addition to SOLIDWORKS design tools, BattleBots teams leverage a range of integrated simulation, visualization, and product data management (PDM) solutions. For example, Team Witch Doctor uses SOLIDWORKS topology optimization to better balance the relationships between its robot’s weight, strength, and stiffness. “If we don’t make it under the 250-pound weight limit, we can’t compete,” says Michael Gellatly, lead designer and driver for Team Witch Doctor.