Knowledge Base
Information and direction to learn the skills that take you from your very first build to Townsville Robot Combat champion — in your weight class and division.
🚧 Heads up — this Knowledge Base is a work in progress. We're actively adding to it, so check back regularly for new guides and detail.
The Foundations
A combat robot looks like a toy and fights like a tank — and underneath it is a surprising amount of real STEM. Building one pulls in all four pillars at once: the science of how materials behave under impact and how a motor turns electricity into force; the technology of CAD software, 3D printers and electronic speed controllers; the engineering of turning an idea into a machine that actually drives and survives; and the maths of weight budgets, gear ratios, voltages and centre of gravity. You don't need a degree in any of it — you pick it up one build at a time — but every robot you make quietly teaches you all four.
In practice the journey looks like this: you design and model your robot in CAD, prototype and 3D print the parts, wire up the electronics — motors, battery, speed controllers and a receiver — and then learn to drive and control it under the pressure of a live arena. Each stage is a skill in its own right, and this Knowledge Base is here to help you build them up.
Design Thinking
Build a robot you can reconfigure between fights, not a one-trick machine.
The best combat robots aren't fixed — they're modular. Design yours so you can swap parts quickly between matches: different armour types (light and fast, or thick and tanky), armour moved to different positions to cover wherever you keep getting hit, and weapon lengths or styles changed to suit the fight. The more options you can bolt on, the more answers you have.
That's why a well-stocked spares box wins events. Carry a few tricks and spare configurations so you can read each opponent and adapt — play to your own strengths and set up to exploit their weaknesses. Struggling against a low wedge? Fit a longer weapon or reposition your armour and roll out a different robot. Adapt to whoever's in front of you and you'll be a real threat in competition.
Prototyping is the quickest way to dial a design in. Instead of printing a whole robot and hoping for the best, print small test pieces to check the things that simply have to be right — hole sizes, motor and bearing fits, mounting points and tolerances. A ten-minute test print that confirms a motor seats perfectly saves you a ten-hour reprint of the entire chassis. Print, measure, tweak, repeat — that loop is where good robots are made.
Every good robot is an exercise in give and take. Understand these two ideas and the rest of the build makes a lot more sense.
A constraint is a hard limit you have to build within — you can't argue with it, you can only design around it. Your weight-class maximum, the battery voltage cap (2S for Antweights, 3S for Beetleweight), the 90% plastic rule, the motors and their torque, the plastic types you can print, the size of the arena — these are all fixed. Your job is to make the best possible robot inside them.
Once the constraints are fixed, every choice is a trade. Spend weight on one thing and you take it from another. Thicker armour means a lighter, weaker weapon. A bigger weapon motor means a smaller battery and less run time. Wide, grippy wheels for control leave no weight for wheel guards — so you put that armour on the front instead. There's rarely one "right" answer.
You can't change the constraints, so you get clever with the compromises. A patient control bot and a brutal spinner can both win — they've simply made different trades with the same weight budget. Learning to make those trades deliberately, instead of by accident, is what turns a parts list into a competitive robot.
Weight Management
Every robot is weighed before it fights and must come in under its class limit. Go over — even by a gram — and you don't get to fight. Here's how to stay legal and still hit hard.
Your weight budget is fixed, so spend it where it counts. Reinforcement and refinement is the constant back-and-forth of strengthening the parts that take a beating and trimming the parts that don't. Hollow out, thin down or lighten areas that aren't structural or never get hit — then pour that recovered weight straight back into what wins fights: thicker armour where you take impacts, or denser, tougher plastic prints in the key areas. Same legal weight on the scales, a far harder robot in the arena.
Your slicer can estimate a model's weight right in the slice preview — but only if you tell it the correct filament density. Put the right density value into the filament profile of whatever slicer you use (Cura, Bambu Studio, PrusaSlicer, OrcaSlicer and so on), and the preview weight becomes far more accurate — not perfect, but close enough to plan around before you waste hours of printing. You'll find that density figure on the filament brand's website, usually on the very same product page that sells you the filament, listed in the TDS (Technical Data Sheet). Two minutes of setup that saves you a nasty surprise on the scales.
Antweight Brackets
The AUS & US Antweight classes each run two brackets, so you can fight the way that suits your robot — and your nerves.
Less about wrecking your opponent, more about putting on a show. These fights are judged largely on the entertainment your robot creates for the crowd and how well you control the arena — driving, positioning, aggression and style. A clever pusher or flipper with no spinning weapon can dominate here. It's the friendliest place to start: you don't need to destroy (or risk destroying) your robot to do well, so it's perfect for a first build and learning to drive.
Exactly what it says on the tin — the goal is to disable your opponent's robot within the time allowed. Spinners, flippers and crushers come out to play, and a clean knockout can end the fight early. It's higher risk and higher reward: more damage to dish out, but also more to repair afterwards.
This is where the Carnage lives.
Mindset & Approach
The design calls you make — and the lessons every loss teaches — matter more than raw power. Keep building and you'll keep getting better.
When you upgrade a body or design a new weapon, the engineering choices you make are often the difference between victory and defeat — where you place the armour, how you mount and balance the weapon, where the weight sits. Sweat these decisions. A well-thought-out robot beats a powerful but poorly-designed one more often than not.
Here's the secret most champions won't tell you: you learn more from a loss than a win. A loss shows you exactly where the robot is weak — the armour that cracked, the weapon that jammed, the mount that sheared off. Take that back to the drawing board and redesign, and you reinforce everything you've learned since your last build. Every champion has a pile of broken first attempts behind them.
This Knowledge Base will keep growing — build guides, design tips, slicer settings and hard-won lessons from the arena. Got something you want us to cover? Tell us.
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