Team Storm - Storm II

The Storm II Story

Welcome to the start of the story of Storm II. In terms of it's amazing rise from New Blood to World Champion, Storm II is the most successful robot ever to appear on UK TV.

There's a long story behind Storm II - a machine which was never destined for UK shores. After the completion of Storm our first heavyweight robot the team were eager to learn from the mistakes that we had made. Storm was and still is a wonderful machine to drive, very versatile and a real crowd pleaser. However in order to get Storm to where it was it involved making a lot of compromises - in hindsight, too many compromises. Saying that though for a first attempt it was pretty good !

The sport of Robotic Combat is rapidly changing, weapons come in and out of fashion. Tracking the trends over time you get

Wedge -> Lifter -> Flipper -> Spinner............

Where does it go from here was what we asked when we started to think about Storm II. Ignoring all the weapons, the silly hats, the silly t-shirts and gimmicks and the talk - what is it that really makes a winning robot. If we had to design a machine from first principles to go in and win, what would we have to do..... and so a list was born

Reliable
Easy to Maintain in the field
Invertible
Fast (20mph) and highly manoeuvrable
Rapid acceleration - for getting out of (and into) trouble
Strong enough to take the impacts dealt out by spinners and axes
Powerful enough to hit opponents hard enough to cause structural damage

All in one robot - oh, and anyone noticed that nowhere in the list does it need a weapon ;o) ?

The Concept

It was that last point that got us thinking. How could we build a robot that was powerful enough to cause structural damage to an opponent. Internal damage was what we wanted to cause. Yes visual damage is all very nice, and if a fight goes down the the judges then they're going to look at visual damage, but to damage the internals of a machine, bend the chassis out of alignment - that's the way to win fights as we saw it.

The concept that came out of this discussion was simple. The way to damage someone internally isn't to wave a bit of metal about on the end of an arm, it isn't to spin up bits of metal as fast as you can on a disk and chase after someone. The answer is to use the robot as the weapon. If you don't have to worry about carrying a complex weapons system you can concentrate your strength into one small package. It would allow a tiny yet robust chassis, it would need to contain motors capable of propelling the chassis at high speed. It would need all the weight that you would usually allow for a weapon to be diverted into the structure of the machine - if it crashed into something stronger than it was.... it could all be over in the blink of an eye.

Hence Storm II was conceived as a somewhat radical concept. A robot without a weapon. Well, it depends on how you look at it - you could argue its all one bit weapon, a lot like a full body spinner. We coined the phrase "Full Body Hammer" because that's exactly what it is. Storm II does a GENUINE 20 +mph.

It accelerates to that speed in about 1.5m of space, traveling at 20mph it delivers also 4Kj of energy when it smashes something against a solid object. Without any of the requirement of the complex weapons system that we put in Storm we had come up with something from scratch..... that fulfilled all our criteria, and that didn't have a weapon.

The plan had always been to enter the machine (originally under the working title of Project:2) into the November 2002 Battlebots in San Francisco. In Battlebots it doesn't matter what your machine is like, as long as you can deliver the goods in the Battlebox you're in. It would be far harder to get onto Robot Wars - with a desire for all machines to have an 'active weapon' from the producers, the emphasis is more on how good the machine looks, than is it an efficient fight winner.

However in September 2002 disaster struck, Comedy Central had pulled the plug on Battlebots in the US. Whilst the concept still existed, the television network behind it had pulled out. Battlebots November was put on hold..... meaning we had a robot (or a pile of parts at this point) and no-where to play with it.

As though they were being our saviour Mentorn decided that for the next Robot Wars Extreme competition they wanted to run a competition for new robots that had never seen on TV before. There was something slightly ironic about entering a robot called Storm II to the competition - and due to a mix-up with our application Mentorn thought that we were entering the original Storm robot to the show (with the hydralics) when we arrived with Storm II (a robot with no weapon) they didn't quite know what to do. Storm II's life was almost cut short until Bill Hobbins intervened and agreed to give us our shot - after all it wasn't out fault that Mentorn hadn't actually bothered to read our entry form ;o)

Read our write up of our very first competition (and win!) here.

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