Battle Number 3 - A fun 'grudge' match against Thumper!

An excellent shot of Hercules flipping Thumper over. (This is an actual screenshot from the TV show 'Extra' that covered the event!) Note the remote sensor that we had to mount to Hercules so that Thumper could 'see' him.

Well, since this event was double elimination, and Hercules had lost his two fights, there wasn't anything left to look forward to except the melee and any grudge matches.

Later that afternoon, I was asked/challenged by one of the autonomous robot creators- "Thumper" if I would like to do battle against him (he had alredy beaten the tar out of the only other autonomous robots). By then, I was feeling a little more confident with my makeshift control system (we even got the mixing feature working again on my Radio transmitter, so steering wasn't nearly so hard as before), so I said sure!

In case you are wondering about that "autonomous" thing, it is a robot that is completely self-guided and controlled. It has no human controller, it just is programmed to search down the robot with the other sensor and disable it. So, I had to attach a big red sensor to the top of Hercules for this event so that Thumper could "see" Hercules.

I had a great time with this round, it was mostly for show anyway, so I let Thumper chase me around for a couple minutes until we both got stuck in a corner (requiring the arene crew to separate us), Then Hercules picked Thumper up and carried him to the other side of the arena, flipping him over first one way, then the other, and then a quick victory dance.... The crowd loved it, and it was pretty fun. The round was filmed by the 'Discovery Channel' and the 'Extra' TV show.