Choosing parts for your robot

Every good robot starts with a parts list

In the beginning of any robotics project, the first thing you and your team needs to decide is what parts are necessary in order for the robot to function properly and accomplish its goals. Now applying this thought to a sumo bot, one finds that the aspirations of a sumo bot are quite simple; when an enemy robot is in its sensor's range, it will try to push it outside of the ring to score a point.

When watching a live robot sumo match for the first time, you might have certain questions pop up like:

• How does the robot detect another robot?

• How does the robot know not to accidentally go off the edge of the ring?

• How is the robot able to move without a human behind a remote?

These questions will all be answered in the following sections where we cover what are considered the basic components needed to build a sumo bot. After choosing what parts you want to put in your robot, we will then learn to assemble those parts into a schematic to better understand how everything is connected.