Nicholas' robot Overdozer goes to war in deadly arena

Robot Wars' Team Overdozer from Falkirk Nicholas White, Jonathan Young and Fhiannan McIvor

Nicholas White (25) and his two friends Jonathan Young (20) and Fhiannan McIvor (22) entered a robot in the re-boot of the classic TV show Robot Wars and pitted their creation against some of the most feared machines in the business.

After Nicholas heard the show was returning to screens he immediately asked his friends to see if they were interested.

The IT support manager said: “We all grew up watching the show so we decided to go for it and enter a robot.”

Back in February the friends got to work creating their machine.

Nicholas said: “We had never built a robot before so it was certainly a unique experience for us.”

Jonathan was in charge of the fabrication of the machine, Fhiannan was head of electronics and team captain Nicholas was given the task of being the driver.

The team based their design on the frame of an electronic wheelchair and stripped it of all unneccessary parts. They then remodelled it into Overdozer.

Nicholas said: “The name came from us over-sleeping and from the scoop on the front making it look a bit like a bulldozer.”

The robot killing machine was protected by medium density fibre board, had two spikes at the rear and a two stroke petrol strimmer metal wire as a weapon.

The team’s exploits will be shown this Sunday’s show on BBC2 at 8pm.

Nicholas said Overdozer handled itself very well in the arena.

He said: “Everything worked the way it was supposed to and considering it was our first robot we did quite well.

“Entering the arena was amazing, everything is so big. The House Robots are massive and it was a bit daunting for us a newcomers.”

However, Nicholas said the group have been bitten  by the bug and are already planning to build a second robot.

But he refused to give anything away regarding how well Overdozer handled itself in the arena.