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DESIGNER NAME: ANDREW LINDSEY AKA "JUSTDREW" COUNTRY: USA DATE OF INTERVIEW: 20 JUNE 2001 DAILY GRIND: Electrical engineering and PCB layout for a small electronics firm. I also build real hardware combat robots for BattleBots, Robotica, and similar competitions. Firstly congratulations on winning the Inaugural Pro tournament, was Red Hot Poker (RHP) a brand new design or an evolution from previous designs? It was a brand new design, not based on anthing I'd built or seen in the tournaments. It started out as an experiment in construction techniques, an attempt to see if it was possible to built a very long, thin weapon arm with nothing but the weapon components exposed. It was so effective in testing, I decided to develop it into a serious design. With some pretty experienced designers in the competition were there any Bots in particular you were worried about coming up against? Yes, most of them. There are some very polished, scary robots in the professional ranks, and I'm still suprised that I won the event. I was really worried about the big compound spinner bots - designs like to Raven and Wu Tang Master - these kinds of bots generate so much recoil when they hit that they could have knocked RHP's weapon to the side, then gotten in past it to hit the exposed components and sliders behind the weapon. Did you stay up and watch RHP's progression through to the final? No, had to get up early the next morning. Just went to sleep, then wasn't able to check till late the next evening. What type of training routine did you use in the lead up to the tournament? How many hours did you put in? Did you make use of the challenge rooms or was RHP kept under wraps until the big day? After testing RHP against all the standard example bots, I went online and downloaded every publicly available bot file I could find. I didn't end up changing much from that - the original design worked very well against the old standards. I also built several "adversary" bots, designed with various tactics intended to beat RHP, and improved its design by testing against them. Because I hadn't seen anything like this design, I decided to keep it a secret up until the professional tournament. So I didn't bring it to the challenge rooms, or enter a stripped-down version in the amatuer tournaments - although some of the adversairy test bots I built to go against it did make it into the early tournaments How long have you been a RoboForge designer, and what were the greatest challenges you had to overcome along the way? I've been building bots on and off since the early beta tests - about 6 months now unless I'm mistaken. It's been an on-and-off thing as I've had to split my time between Roboforge and being in the shop cutting metal on our combat robots for BattleBots. The biggest challenge for me was learning the AI. I've done a fair amount of programming, but the RoboForge scripting language isn't like anything I've worked with before. I've found that it's far more reliable to have a simple attack and code made up of many small sub-modules, than try and hang your hopes on a complex AI-intensive attack method. Although the RoboForge world isnt anywhere near as difficult for a robot to navigate as the real one, the other robot's design and Ai are still a complete unknown. I favor simple, rugged designs with AI that's coded bottom-up from proven routines. Design or AI - which would you spend the most time on? At first it was AI, back when I was still learning the scripting language and trying to write overly clever attack schemes. These days I've gotten it boiled down to a dozen or so standardized routines that I base all my bots on, and I spend my time trying to get the right part geometry for the job. 
What are the main influences in your Bot design? Believe it or not - Legos. When I was a kid Legos were my favorite toy - lots of small pieces that you could combine together in nearly unlimited combinations. RoboForge is like that; I design by looking at components one by one and figuring out new ways to combine them in different shapes. And unlike my Lego set, the RoboForge parts move on their own when I'm finished. Finally any tips for people starting out with RoboForge? Don't be afraid to experiment. There are a lot of non-obvious tricks in the AI code and physics engine, and they way to learn them is by experimenting. About half my bots haven't been tournament bots at all, but experimental designs intended to probe some aspect of RoboForge's operation. The debugging window in the battle playback is an incredibly useful tool. The Triumphant Red Hot Poker
PREVIOUS FEATURED DESIGNER Click on the links below to read about our previous Featured Designers - "ABC" "DORPHEN" TOM ELLIS AKA "OCC" ANDREW LINDSEY AKA "JUSTDREW" |
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