The Swarm

"The power of four!"

- Robot Wars: The Official Handbook

The Swarm is a clusterbot built by Team Big Brother, which competed in Series 10 of Robot Wars. Included among the unit are Rubber Duck, Pinza, Skye, and Blenda.

Design
"The Swarm’s four-part clusterbot design is inspired by bees, who swarm together when under attack."

- The Robot Wars website

The Swarm was a clusterbot which consisted of a total of six lightweight robots. Due to weight restrictions, and the team only being permitted four members, only four robots of The Swarm can be used in any one battle, so Team Big Brother had to choose the most appropriate for each fight, keeping two other robots in reserve for the future.

In order to defeat The Swarm, three of the four clusterbots must be immobilised.


 * Rubber Duck was a yellow wedge-shaped robot with a rear-hinged flipper, capable of flipping a motorbike. This flipper also allowed the robot to self-right. Alternatively, Rubber Duck could drive under other robots to hold them in place. Rubber Duck was painted entirely yellow, in homage to its name.


 * Blenda is invertible, and was The Swarm’s primary way of inflicting damage, as its horizontal bar spinner can damage even heavyweight robots. Blenda has a high ground clearance around all sides, and is also yellow.


 * Pinza used a roughly roll-over shape, and is similar in design to Monad. Its ground clearance was high, but Pinza was very fast, and was armed with horizontal pincers, to match the robot’s insect theme. This design was previously used by Team Big Brother as part of their BattleBots entry Creepy Crawlies, which also meant that Pinza is one of the lightest in The Swarm, as Creepy Crawlies is a five-part clusterbot. Pinza uses a camouflage green appearance, and was lined with a row of LEDs.


 * Skye was blue, and features an overhead windmill structure, with six protruding pieces of tyre. Skye can use sit-and-spin tactics to protect itself from all angles, although its primary purpose is to entangle spinning weapons. Skye has no defence against being flipped.

An invertible parallelogram-shaped design, driven by four wheels, is also available as a combatant. With no active weapon, it uses its wedge shape as a form of offence.

According to Robot Wars: Build Your Own Robot and the Robot Wars website, the individual weights of the robots are 24.5kg, 23.5kg, 27kg and 29kg. It is unspecified which weight is attributed to which robot.

Series 10
The Swarm competed in Heat 1.

Results

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Outside Robot Wars
The Swarm was not the first clusterbot that Ian and Sam Watts entered into a televised competition, as they had previously competed in Season 2 of ABC’s BattleBots with the five-part clusterbot, Creepy Crawlies. All five parts of Creepy Crawlies were identical to Pinza, with John Fritzell of Team Terror Turtle also becoming part of the team. Creepy Crawlies had to enter BattleBots: The Gears Awaken in order to earn a place in the main bracket, but it was drawn against former champion Son of Whyachi, as well as Ultraviolent. Although Creepy Crawlies remained mobile for longer than Ultraviolent, Son of Whyachi’s spinner immobilised all of its segments, eliminating Creepy Crawlies from the competition.

Team Big Brother also brought a clusterbot to the Chinese TV show King of Bots, where three of the clusterbots use the same basic design as Blenda.

Trivia

 * With four parts in the arena, and six altogether, The Swarm features the most segments out of any clusterbot in Robot Wars, along with Nuts 2 and its three minibots.
 * One of the Swarm segments was unintentionally revealed by Noel Sharkey and the Official Robot Wars Facebook page, during a clip they posted showcasing a new onboard camera fitted onto Dead Metal.