Rumble Robots are a new line of remote control toys that actually fight with each other! They move in six directions, punch, talk and even shoot beams of light. You can teach a Rumble Robot new skills or boost its speed and power by swiping special trading cards through a built-in card reader.

Inside the robot’s controller, there are two circuit boards and a small infrared light (infrared is a kind of light that is invisible to the human eye). When you move the controller pad, it pushes down on parts of the circuit boards, completing different electrical circuits. When these circuits are complete, they power the infrared light, making it flash on and off. Each circuit makes the light turn on and off in a certain sequence of short and long flashes, just like a Morse code lamp.

The robot has a receiver on top of its head (#2) that senses the light impulses and translates them into pulses of electricity. The electrical pulses travel through wires to the robot’s “brain,” the central integrated circuit (IC) (#3). When it receives these pulses, the IC powers the different motors that move the robot.

The bottom half of the robot has two motors that spin a series of gears to move the robot’s wheels. Each motor spins the wheels on one side of the robot. To change the direction the wheels spin, the IC switches the electric current from positive to negative. If both motors receive positive current, all wheels will spin the same way and the robot will move forward. If one motor receives positive current and the other receives negative current, the wheels on each side will spin in opposite directions, and the robot will turn.

The top half of the robot has only one motor. It turns gears that move the robot’s arms. When the motor spins, it pulls one arm back and pushes the other forward. When the gears pull one of the arms all the way back, the teeth of the gears unlock and the arm springs forward. This is how the robot punches.

The robot’s card reader (#6) is just like the bar-code scanner at a grocery store. It shines a beam of light over a pattern of black and white lines on the card (#7). The reader senses the light that bounces back from the white lines, but the black lines absorb the light. The robot converts this pattern of reflected light to a pattern of electrical pulses, which it sends to the robot’s IC. The IC recognizes this pattern and enables a new function, such as punching.

The robot’s light beam is an infrared light like the one in the controller, but it communicates using a different pattern of flashes. When you pull the trigger, the controller tells the IC to activate this light. Each robot has an infrared receiver on its belly area, in addition to the receiver on its head. When a robot’s belly receiver picks up the infrared from another robot’s light beam, it tells the IC that the robot has been hit. If your robot gets hit enough times, the IC will shut it down and the fight is over!