Team Just Cuz Robotics | Optimize Your Combat Robot Parts! (Fusion 360 Simulations Tutorial) @JustCuzRobotics | Uploaded 4 years ago | Updated 5 hours ago
EDIT: As of September 2020, Fusion 360 hobbyist or personal licenses no longer allow access to the simulation workspace. Education/student or professional licenses remain unchanged.

This video will focus on how you can intelligently lightweight and optimize your combat robot parts! Using Fusion 360 Simulations, it's easy to mock up different load cases and see how they will distribute stresses on your parts. With this, you can determine what areas of a part are functional and which aren't and thus where you can remove weight from a part and maintain the majority of its strength.

It's worth noting here that this was mostly a quick overview and not even remotely the way I design every part of my own bots. Generally, I learn from seeing simulations of some parts based on particular loading/constraint sets what types of features can be beneficial (say, fillets) and what can be problematic (sharp corners, holes in the middle of a part) in order to avoid stress concentrations and more evenly distribute the load within a part. I would not take the time to simulate several load cases on every part of a design as this would take ages. Rather for parts that look over-engineered, need to be a minimum weight, or if your full robot is designed but overweight, you can select a few parts to analyze in order to determine the best way to save weight. Combat robot spinning weapons, lifter arms, and drive/weapon shafts or other parts that are functionally critical are also great candidates to be analyzed for optimal strength/weight. It can take just a few minutes to set up a quick bend force test to see the factor of safety difference between a steel shaft and a titanium one.

The trickiest thing about simulations is that once you move beyond 'every bolthole is a fixed constraint' it can get quite complicated to set them up properly. If not set up properly, it can lead to completely incorrect results. Below I'll link to some much longer and thorough tutorials that cover the subject in detail.

Also - keep manufacturing in mind. You cannot make a partial depth pocket in a laser-cut or waterjet part and must instead punch through it. Adding fillets on every edge of every face in a pocket is great when you're 3D printing but can massively complicate and or slow down CNC machining.


Lars Christensen works for Autodesk and has a prolific collection of Fusion tutorials. Autodesk's own channel also has many of them.

Simulations for Absolute Beginners: http://bit.ly/SimsForBeginnersLars
How To Make Design Decisions With Simulation: http://bit.ly/SimDesignDecisionsLars
More Comprehensive Simulations Basics: http://bit.ly/SimBasicsAutodesk

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