Cannon Fodder was the second antweight robot built by Team Panda Monium. It was originally made in a hurry to be used in the first Antweight World Series. Its simple flail weapon was never very effective but the little robot certainly made up for this and somehow alway has done okay for itself. Like Pants, it uses modified micro servos as drive motors – they are modified for constant rotation. It was the first ant to use the now ubiqitous HS81 servos.

Cannon Fodder was also a revolution in that it was the first antweight to have a charging port and an on/off switch built in. This was necessary as access to the inner workings was not as convenient as on Pants.

This flail chain was powered by a single standard HS300 servo motor. The motor is removed from its casing and pushed through the top of the casing. The chain was simply soldered onto the top. Although fast and impressive sounding, the chain never developed anything like enough energy to cause any real damage to other ants. This may explain why virtually no flails have appeared in the heavyweight Robot Wars classes.

Cannon Fodder underwent a complete rebuild prior to World Series IV. This included a circular saw blade instead of the flail and the servo motor was replaced by a 18,000 rpm 1.5v model motor….running at 4.8v of course:-)

The saw blade was from a machine tool and was picked up for a few pence from a stall at the Brighton Model World. It could cut wood but in reality it was more of a percussion weapon, pushing the opponent away. Balancing the blade and controlling it at full speed, due to the gyro effect, proved to be difficult.

Cannon Fodder received a special child-friendly disk for demonstration purposes. The plastic disk comes from a burger toy and spins rather well. The in-cuts provide fairly solid hits of other robots in play fights and allow us to use CF in demo fights without causing lots of damage. We did put some lead weights in the disk to cause more fun though 🙂