ABOUT THE SWARM

The Swarm is a multibot in the BattleBots SuperHeavyweight division.

A multibot is a robot entry that has multiple, individually controlled segments where the overall weight of all segments does not exceed the weight limits of the class in which it is entered.

The Swarm consists of three, nearly equal weight robots- Locust, Mosquito and Dragonfly.

The idea for The Swarm came together when Stephen Felk and I were brainstorming for something cool and innovative for the upcoming May 2001 BattleBots show. We had discussed the potential of a multibot and decided it would be a worthwhile venture to build a multibot in the superheavyweight division. We invited Paul Mathus (of Das Bot) to join in on the fun.

We decided a three-way multibot would be best, because the BattleBot rules state that a multibot is only knocked out if 50% by weight is immobilized. So if we had 3 equal weight robots, two of them would have to be incapacitated. Not an easy task for a robot of any size.

This way each of us could concentrate and build our own individual robot in our own workspace and not have issues of coordinating our impossible schedules, etc.

This photo of The Swarm appeared in an article in the May 28, 2001 Newsweek magazine!

Locust is my third of The Swarm (Jim Smentowski). Locust was totally reconfigured for Season 5.0.

This bot is the 'teeth' of The Swarm. Since we previously had no way of dishing out damage against our opponents, Stephen and Paul volunteered me to build a vertical spinner, kind of a halfway between Nightmare and Backlash. Locust is invertible and contains the weapon system handed down from Season 4.0's Nightmare!

Locust is the big boy of the three, at 124 lbs.

Mosquito is built by Stephen Felk (of Voltronic fame). This highly manouverable wedge is low to the ground and has an extra-wide nose to scoop under the prey.

This incredibly sturdy 97 lb machine is built to withstand the attacks from robots much larger than itself.

Dragonfly is built by Paul Mathus (of Das Bot fame). Dragonfly attacks relentlessly with his titanium wedge-scoops.

This 116lb machine can also drive upside-down, and has tremendous pushing power.