For our school's annual combat robotics competition, I built a flipper robot. I had built one in a class before, but this was my first bot I built on my own. It was also the first bot I built that looked like a real battlebot (the previous one looked like it was about to break down at any moment). However robust this one looked, it was pretty bad in actual combat. Most of my effort this year was spent in planning the tournament itself, and so I didn't give my bot the testing and reinforcement it deserved, and sadly it is no longer with us (doomed to the scrapyard forever more).
One of my life goals is to build another much much better battlebot with the knowledge I have now. Stay tuned for that…
I've always had a fascination with flipper robots. I used five miscellaneous springs lying around of various strengths. At this point in my education I had not discovered the wonders of finite element analysis and didn't quite know just how to design the most robust system, so there was a lot of trial and error, but for a students first independent try there was a lot of merit (in my humbly biased opinion).