Wedges are a passive weapon type which have been seen in a wide range of BattleBots competitors since the show's inception. They are often used in combination with lifting and flipping weaponry in order to make them more efficient.
Originally, they were commonly seen during early events as a cheap and efficient way to win battles, but are now used more subtly and in conjunction with other weapon types and robot designs.
Design and History[]
La Machine uses its wedge and brute force to disable DooAll.
A wedge is the name given to any attachment or robot whose shape forms a triangle from the side, usually taking on the shape of a ramp.
Considered the pioneer of the wedge, Greg Munson and Trey Roski competed in the earliest US Robot Wars competitions in San Francisco with La Machine, winning the 1995 event outright. Combining its large ramp-like wedge with impressive speed and drive power, La Machine was able to use brute force to dominate its opponents.
In order to negate the disadvantage of wedges often being useless when a robot is upside-down, several competitors incorporated a dual wedge into their design, meaning no matter which way up the robot was, one of its wedges could still function as intended. Perhaps the best-known example was Bad Attitude, which later ran under the name Nasty Attitude and featured in BattleBots merchandise.
BattleBots IQ 2002 champion, Wee Willy Wedgy.
Although no robot with a wedge as its primary weapon won a televised BattleBots season, middleweight competitor Wee Willy Wedgy notably won the inaugural BattleBots IQ competition in 2002. In the same event, The Edge earned runner-up and the Most Aggressive Robot Award.
Maximus using its hinged wedge against IceBerg.
Another variation of the wedge design is a hinged wedge. Their main advantage is for gravity to keep the leading edge of the wedge flush to the arena floor, maximising opportunity for a robot to get underneath its opponent. Maximus was a successful example of this, who used its hinged front wedge to reach the semifinals of Season 5.0 and won the superheavyweight division at the Las Vegas RoboJoust event.
Nowadays, robots armed solely with no active weaponry, sometimes known as wedgebots, are outlawed as per BattleBots design rules. Wedges are still utilized, though exclusively alongside an active primary weapon. Modern day BattleBots competitors typically make use of forks and smaller wedges called wedgelets to get underneath opponents. Large wedge and plow attachments have often been equipped to counter powerful kinetic weapons such as horizontal spinners, as they can often deflect energy back into the opponent and use their own active weaponry against them.
Advantages & Disadvantages[]
Advantages[]
- As they require no moving parts, they are cheap and simple to build.
- They can be backup weapons if the user's main weapon is out of commission.
- Alternatively, they can be used as shields of sorts, bearing the brunt of a powerful spinner. Bite Force and ROTATOR both used titanium-wedges against Tombstone and it helped both win (with the former even doing it twice).
- They can topple a target over, which can result in a win if the opponent is neither invertible nor can self-right.
Disadvantages[]
- Due to their need to be as low as possible, they can be prone to snaring themselves in seams in the arena.
- Unless the user had a parallelogram- or ramp-shaped body, then wedges were downright useless if the user was flipped over. The Crusher ended up suspending itself off the floor on the wall so far that its wheels couldn't touch the ground, resulting in its downfall.
- If a wedge is contorted upward, then its use will diminish.
- Alternatively if it's contorted downward, it will hinder the user's mobility or even high-center it.
- They are not classified as active weapons.
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