way at some point during the competition.
Okay, so you've finished your bot with a few months to spare. This is the piece of advice that you are just not going to want to take.
I want you to go to the hardware store. Buy the biggest sledgehammer you can find (the really big kind that makes you strain when you lift them). Now, raise it above your robot ... and beat the living hell out of it.
Awe, did it bweak? Issums widdle wobot in a big pile uv parts??? Well, I just saved you the indignity of having that happen while 3,000 people watched. If your robot cannot survive a good bashing with a sledgehammer, circular saw, or a 10 foot free-fall, it will not last in the arena.
Use good 6061 or 7075 aluminum, steel, or (preferably) titanium. Make sure you have a good enough infrastructure to support your outer shell.
Ensure that all components are securely mounted. They're going to get knocked around. I lost count long ago of the number of battery packs that I have seen flying across the arena because they got knocked out of the bot in a big hit. If you lose your batteries, you lose the match. It's that simple.
Drop your bot off the roof of your garage. No, really. It's a good simulation of what's going to happen when a bot like Ziggy flips it 15 feet in the air, or a spin-bot like Last Rites whacks it once and sends it flying across the arena. Your bot has to be able to withstand that kind of hit. Even if you're the best driver in the world, you're still going to take lots of knocks (including on the bottom of your bot, so have undercarriage armor as well). You must be able to survive those hits, and your first match is the wrong time to find out where your weak spots are.
5. Have a weapon system.
Better yet, have two. This is robot combat. You don't play baseball without a bat; you don't go to war without a gun; and you don't become a pro-wrestler without having at least two frontal lobotomies. If you want to beat the daylights out of the other robot, bring a weapon!
Wedges can be effective, but it's extremely rare for a wedge with no other weaponry to make it to the finals.
Watch lots of matches (everything you can from You Tube and other videos, or better still, buy a three-day pass for an event) and take lots of notes. See what weapons work and which don't. Think about why things worked. Two weapon systems that look identical may operate completely differently, with very different results.
Better yet, come up with a new and unique weapon system. Something that hasn't been tried before. Every time I go to a competition, somebody has brought along a new robot which garnishes lots of oohs and ahs from the masses — and more than a few times of "Why didn't I think of that?" Just make sure the weapon is allowable in the rules (no liquids and no tasers).
I swear some people show up to a competition having only ever tested their robots on kittens. Sure, it may give your garage a nice new primer coat of kitty juice, but that doesn't mean it will even scratch the paint on another 1/4" steel armored robot.
I walk the pits before competitions and between matches to see who's doing what and how this year's robots are sizing up. During one event, I saw a well designed super heavyweight with a horizontal spinning mass (that's our technical term for a big spinning hunk of metal). Except the metal bar had not a single ding on it. You can give something a nice coat of paint, but you can't hide the dings. No scratches. Nothing. On closer inspection, I noticed that the bar (which probably weighed 40 pounds) was held to the rotating shaft with a half ounce cotter pin. The kind your six year old niece can bend with her pinky.
"You guys test this against anything?"
"Of course not, it could hurt someone!"
The first time that metal bar hit another robot, the pin sheared, the bar went flying, and they were done. If they had spent five minutes in their garage or at some junkyard testing their weapon against a solid object, they would have realized the cotter pin was a weak link and they could have fixed it.
There's a term for this: Cargo Cult. It comes from South Pacific islanders who got used to planes coming in during World War II bringing supplies. After the war, the planes stopped coming. So, islanders fashioned headsets from coconuts, built runway towers, and made landing lights. Still, the planes never came. Just because something looks the same, doesn't mean it will work the same. Don't be a cargo cult competitor.
While you're testing, make sure that you're able to actually push twice the amount of dead weight as the maximum in your weight class. This will be a good simulation of a bot pushing against you. If you can't push that much weight, you're probably going to lose.