In one of the biggest hits in BattleBots history, Poison Arrow sent Son of Whyachi on a flight path across the battlebox.
Some speculate that Whyachi lost on a technicality due to not previously registering their 247lb drone with the FAA (though we have credible sources who say Whyachi’s radio receiver broke due to the impact). One of the most common questions we get asked is exactly how high did Whyachi fly through the air? Witnesses of the incident claim anywhere from 6 to 10ft.
With a little MythBusters style video sleuthing and high school physics, it’s pretty easy to calculate how high Whyachi flew. By replaying the video frame by frame, can see Whyachi spent a total of 1.1 seconds airborne. Summoning the powers of projectile motion, the vertical distance Whyachi traveled in that time can be found by:
Whyachi’s velocity Vo isn’t known at takeoff, but is known to be 0 at the apex of its parabolic trajectory. Since the time spent on ascent is the same as descent, the time should be divided by 2:
So about 5 ft, which is less than first hand witness accounts. We suspect that’s because folks based their live observation on “seeing the underside” of Whyachi, but upon replay it appears Whyachi had a slight tilt that caused it to flash its undercarriage only briefly. The fact Whyachi didn’t go tumbling through the air is a testament to how well its spinning hammers gyroscopically stabilized.
We’re not done analyzing the big hit yet though. It’s also possible to figure out how far horizontally Whyachi went by counting the number of steel floor panels which come stock in America at 4ft x 4ft, i.e. the bare minimum bed size of a proper American pickup truck:
We went ahead and highlighted the floor seams which required reviewing multiple frames of the video to identify. No single camera had a wide enough view to capture the entire flight which is why splashdown is off screen and had to be inferred by watching some of the other angles from the show. The flight path looks to be 1.5 by 3.5 floor panels, or 6ft by 14ft. Going back to the classic 500BC Pythagorean theorem, Whyachi traveled the following distance:
No matter how you slice it, the proof is in the math. That was one major hit.