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Robots Battle to the Death! 119

Posted by CmdrTaco from the aibo-scored-dead-last dept.
spiffy1 writes "BattleBots, a fighting tournament between remote-controlled robots, took place this weekend at Long Beach, California. Contestants built robots which were pit against other robots in the same weight class (Kilobot, Megabot, and Gigabot), and tried to disable their opponent by ramming them, cutting them, or tossing them around in a DEADLY ARENA filled with ROTATING BLADES and NASTY SPIKES! The big winner in both the "Gigabot Duel" and the "Best Engineering" categories was "BioHazard" - a wide flat thing with a massive flipping arm. Check out the zdnet article and some pictures and videos at ZDTV. "
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Robots Battle to the Death! More

Robots Battle to the Death!

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  • I'm sorry sir, but your flame-throwing, machine-gun mounted, automated tanklet isn't allowed in the arena. Didn't you get our memo?
  • You should check out Survival Research Laboratories [srl.org]. Cool experiments with vandigraph generators powered by Volkswagon engines not to mention killer robots.
  • So my phased plasma pulse-laser (in the 40 watt range) wouldn't be okay either. Damn!
  • oops
    "(otherwise there would have been a lawsuit between them that was dropped later)"
    should be
    otherwise there wouldn't .....


    sorry

  • Re:This would be much more exciting if... (Score:3)

    by ElJefe ( 41718 ) on Tuesday August 17, 1999 @12:22PM (#1741955)

    Anyone know of a less restricted tournament?

    Yes, I believe it's called "The LA Freeway system".

    -ElJefe

  • Hmmmm. This would have been far, far spiffier if they were actually autonomous, rather
    than large, armed remote-control vehicles.

    It says somewhere on the battlebots web page that they tried this a couple of years ago, but it was embarassingly boring - the robots just wandered around bumping into each other for 5 minutes.
  • Biohazard won last year too. While effective, it's kind of a cheap ploy if you ask me. Just avoiding the other robots' heinous attacks and then flipping them over? If everyone did that it'd be a really boring contest.
  • Only if you throw it at the opponent, cause damage through heat or EMP, or irradiate the judges.
  • I looked all over the ZDnet page as best I could and couldn't see anything other than the 3 video files on the front page. I can't view them from work, but that hardly seems like anything special. Are there video files of the various fights, or what?
  • just because it's not original doesn't mean it's not entertaining
  • Probably one of the funniest robot decapitations wasn't at this event, but in the first-ever robot table-tennis championship, where one contestant sliced itself in half with a guilotine-style "bat".
  • Personally I thought he meant that he liked to fight against robots.

    Must be one tough S.O.B. ...

    TheGeek
    http://www.geekrights.org [geekrights.org]

  • ooo a kibobot.

    didn't sergar argic do that a long time ago?



  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • (ack... I think I'm posting twice... sorry)

    I think lots of non-programmers find the idea of an intelligent robot compelling... The fact that they don't understand how it works doesn't make it any less impressive. It's an idea that has driven science fiction writers for decades.

  • One Must Fall 2097!!! ie robots battling it out in rooms w/ spikes, blades, etc.
  • Next time on Celebrity DeathMatch... Mars Sojourner vs. a Cuisinart.
    --
  • Fully powered flight is not allowed but is seems ground effect is.
  • An autononomous robot would be much more complicated: you would need some sort of sensor input so you would know how and when (and where) to attack, you would need some sort of on-board computer that can handle the inputs, and you would need to interface all of this to all the motors, solenoids, etc. I would guess this would add about $500 (US) to the price of a robot. However, I would think there would be some interest in this; it probably would not be too difficult to add in an autonomous category at something like Robot Wars or Battle Bots. It would probably be much more exciting to watch autonomous robots doing battle, as there would be a new level for error: poorly written code and failing sensors.

    However, wouldn't it be interesting to be able to see something like: "Robot running Linux beats robot running Windows 2000"?

    Now that could be a battle of the OSs!
  • ...Tesla Coil on wheels. :)



    Bowie J. Poag
  • Yea, at first I was impressed, but when I saw the RC part, the coolness factor went downhill..
  • First they had Extreme Fighting. Which was banned. Now they have the same version only its catered to bots. Someone call those bots a lawyer. Violence will never diminish if people continously create these petty "sports"
    Besides what exactly is the purpose of this? To see who has the best bot? Please this is going a bit too far.
  • The problem with having it as an autonomous competition would be the cost. Having autonomous robots compete in soccer, table tennis, and so on is okay, since all the robots survive at the end. But in an event such as BattleBots, the objective is to destroy the opponent.

    If they were to make it autonomous, most of the competitors could not afford to build them, and those few who could both afford and design such machines, would not be willing to send it to the arena to be torn to pieces by some other robot (or arena hazard).

    By keeping it relatively cheap to compete, you encourage people of all backgrounds and ages to enter. The teams are as varied as they come. There are teams of folks who produce industrial robots for a living; teams who produce Hollywood animatronics for movies such as Men In Black, Mighty Joe Young, Gremlins II; mom-and-pop teams; and even one robot built by an early-teenage girl.

    I would prefer if they kept the format of the competition as it is, and simply added an autonomous class for those few who could afford it.

    Later.
  • The judges (if any survive) may rule it as using heat as a weapon. On the other hand, if you use it to take out the floor, and the opposing robot crashes into a crater, you aren't breaking any rules, as you aren't projecting anything at the opposing robot.
  • >Maybe you could hijack that satelite with the giant ballon when it flys by earth tonight.

    I thought the giant baloon was collecting anti-matter?

    Is Cassinni the space probe powered by plutonim that is doing a sling-shot flyby the one you're maybe thingking of?

  • A battery of 105mm field howitzers on motorized carriages, behind entrenched infantry and APCs? A wing of AH64's, backed by assorted MBTs?

    The competition was basically restricted to *very* short-range, non-mass-destruction weapons, driven by remote control. They *needed* "drivers", so the sole gain would be the lack of a human pilot actually *in* the vehicle/device.

    They do fund a lot of research into mostly- or fully- autonomous vehicles, 'tho, with full-size designs 'tho.

  • Re:Weapons of choice? (Score:4)

    by John Campbell ( 559 ) on Tuesday August 17, 1999 @11:07AM (#1741981) Homepage
    Do you want to be the guy who has to debug a large, armed autonomous vehicle?

    "I think we're OW! having a prob OW! lem with the OW! tracking system OW! again..."
  • I'm surprised no one has mentioned an EM Pulse.

    btw, is such a thing possible? That's how they managed to get the soldiers from the Toy Soldiers movie. It was also used in one of the last few scenes in the MaTriX.

    I imagine that adequate Sheilding would be crucal when you let off with this bad-boy...

  • Re:What scares me... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What scares me is this kind of moronic mindset. Not only are you stupid enough to believe that this has potential military application (it doesn't), you have that peculiar twisted view of the world which looks at only the surface and naively believes that the military is only about killing. In your world view, killing is bad (true), therefore the military and military research must be bad (nonsense). It was a damn good thing we had "thousands of fertile minds" working on military technology during World War II -- without them, we would have lost, and in retrospect it is absolutely clear that the consequences of the Allies losing WWII would have been the concentration camp deaths of a lot more than "just" ~6 million. Even though the public didn't know about the camps during the war, it was still clear that the Axis powers represented a grave threat to worldwide freedom. Sometimes you have to fight and kill to prevent a greater tragedy, and when you do it helps to have the best technology available. Furthermore, if anything, the trend of conventional non-nuclear military technology is that the body count goes *down* as the technology goes up, because fewer and fewer people are actually in the front lines and field medicine is improving as well. For example, World War I killed millions of soldiers in trench warfare, a style of fighting which would have been unthinkable with real aircraft and tanks around.
  • a dork i may be, but you should have said "fighting robots are cool"

    see when you have a plural subject you need to use the plural form of the verb...

    awww hell, i'm gonna get flamed.
  • Something to do with that #3 on your comment.

    Moron.
  • "How about jamming your opponent's RC channel?"

    Wouldn't be sporting, I think. Also not very interesting to watch.

  • BattleBots "history" (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Some of you have posted about "seeing this event before." This is not entirely true...

    Robot Wars took place up in SF from 94-97 (I think...). Some guy organized it with the help and funding of a larger corporation. Of course, once the thing got large and profitable, the large company attempted to steal the rights from the guy. He wasn't exactly pleased.

    Bring in some lawyers, and Robot Wars doesn't happen in 1998. I was building a robot for the event, and was a bit annoyed.

    Anyhow, now the company owns the "Robot Wars" name and "BattleBots" is a clone started by friends of the original Robot Wars guy (as the guy can't compete with Robot Wars for a certain number of years).

    I went to all four sessions this year, and have a few comments...

    • Match length: 5 minutes is too long. It got rather boring watching two toasters with wheels running into each other with discharged batteries. I can only think of three or four matches where the duration was entertaining.
    • Audience decision: Many of the competitors felt the audience just cheered for the "cooler" robot, or the robot driven by the 11-year-old (ugh). They were given no specific directions to judge by (damage, control, design, etc...). The GigaBot (heavyweight... whatever) championship was given to Biohazard, even though the competitor, Kill-o-hertz, was just as, if not more aggressive and damaging. But the announcer said Biohazard was the "returning champion" (which is odd considering that this was the first year of BattleBots, he was referring to Robot Wars) which obviously biased the crowd. I was ticked off... Kill-o-hertz was new, better driven, and had a better strategy.
    • The announcer. If you were there, you'll know what I mean. Former American Gladiators should not be MC's.
    • Pit access. One of the nice things about Robot Wars was that one could stroll around the exterior and look at the robots close-up. The Pit at BattleBots was a very controlled area, allowing no better views of the robots from when they're in the ring (BattleBox ... whatever). I ended up getting a pass, but better views would be nice for everyone else.

    Phew. That's my first post on /.

    --
    chahast at pangaea dot dhs dot org

  • what are you talking about?

    Write all the AI code in a simulator, or whatever.
    Additional costs would be negligable... some sensors, and extra processing. You could probably protect most of the "brains" from physical harm anyway....

    It would be far more costly in terms of *time*, but that's just raising the bar...
  • So go build something to specifically beat it...

    Problem is, you'd have to get to the final. All-round performance is what wins, not specific attacks.
  • If U prefer smart bots, you can watch soccer games between teams of bots with real AI.
    There's a world cup each year.
    Check out robocup.org [robocup.org]
  • There's a good site at:

    http://www.cybercomm.net/~alindsey/rw97/ [cybercomm.net]

    with pictures of all the robots, different matches and stuff. Like someone else said, fighting robots is cool .

    --

  • The problem is, there are a number of designs that work particularly well. In the BBC's Robot Wars series, pretty much every other robot is a wedge, normally with some sort of lifting claw on the front to act as a combination weapon and device for self-righting the robot.

    Before that, the classic design was a big box with an engine that used brute force to push opponents about rather than any effective weapons.

    Speaking of effective weapons, most of them aren't. The only one I ever saw that caused much in the way of real damage was an extremely powerful set of pincers. Against most well-constructed robots, circular saws and spikes don't seem to do much damage in the brief periods they can be used.

    All the fun weapons and strategies I've thought of seem to have been banned (including jamming systems, flamethrowers, any electrical weaponry, and non-tethered projectiles). There doesn't seem to be much that can be done in terms of inventing a strategy for beating wedge-shaped robots (other than making sure yours is self-righting and preferably has limited ground clearance so it's harder to get underneath) either, so it all begins to get a little dull after a while.
  • Except when cool is an adverb that modifies fighting instead of an adjective that modifies robots, i.e. "fighting is cool" or "fighting using robots is cool" in which case the singular form of the verb, is would be correct.

    I'll leave it to someone else to determine who the dorks actually are.
  • I don't see why it should cost so much. You wouldn't need anything much more complex than the computer controls used in a micromouse. Salvage an old Z80 or 6502 motherboard and use the parallel port to turn on/off the various motors.

    Shouldn't be that much work, and would probably cost less than $150 for everything. Even if you were to up the processor power to a 386 or a 486, you're probably talking less than $200 for the complete kit.

  • In your interpretation, "fighting" is a gerund. Gerunds are modified by adverbs (as in "fleeing quickly"), but when used with a copulating verb ("be", "seem", etc.) take adjectives.

    Of course, he probably was trying to use "fighting" as an adjectival participle to modify "robots", in which case he should've made his numbers agree.
  • For those of you who like the idea and/or reality of this show, you should look at Scrapheap [llew.co.uk] which starts a new series early September on Channel 4 in the UK.

    This show is hosted by Robert Llewellyn (yes, he of Kryten in Red Dwarf [reddwarf.co.uk] fame) and basically is a day long race between 2 teams to use anything they can find in a London scap heap to build machines to then compete against each other in a pre-set challenge.

    It's actually even better than it sounds, and accessable to geeks like me, and my 4 and 6 year old kids alike - we can't get enough of this show!

  • You are talking about a basic autonomous robot that can move around by itself. I'm talking about something that can find the enemy robot among all the other moving objects in the arena, can defend itself against the enemy's weapon, even though it doesn't know what that weapon will be until just before the match, can deploy its own weapon at the proper timing and at the correct range, and can avoid all of the arena's traps and hazards. See the difference?
  • Whew, I'm glad this didn't get /.ed before the event othewrwise it would have made the webcast servers crash even more than they did.

    while we are on the subject of fighting robots Our website contains details of our entrys into RobotWars UK and some links to other RW sites

  • An open rotary saw is exactly what one of the most destructive robots there had (Nightmare), except this is no ordinary saw its about 1/2" thick and between 2' and 3' in diameter. Took huge chunks out of the first robot it went up against, but then the organisers made the driver rotate the blade in the opposite direction so bits flung up from the saw didnt hit the crowd!

    There is also a very cool crushing robot called Razer, which use hydraulics to exert huge forces on other robots.

    There are links to many other fighting robots from around the world on http://www.dangerousmachines.com/links/
    under entrants, there's about 150 websites linked to from there.

    Don't forget to look at our robot, FireStorm :)

    Alex
  • There must be some rules governing what sort of weapons the robots can have right? i.e. can you send a em pulse to disable the circuitry (hopefully shielding yours)? Can you attach a submachine gun and just spray in circles? Grenades? Glue guns?

    -avi
  • RoboWars are very cool but BBC did the same thing about a year ago - and I think they were not even the first to have a show like that on TV ! :-)

    --Tim
  • Why is this news? I know of a few high schools and clubs in Texas and elsewhere that have been doing this sort of thing for years. It wasn't televised or anything, but it was the same thing.

    --
    Wonko the Sane

  • ...is thinking about who might be lurking in the audience at competitions like these. Recruiters from the military looking for the next genius of mass destruction?

    This sort of competition has always thrilled me with its glitzy hardware and clever ideas, but I hope we can all keep in mind the fact that the military has no scruples about funneling that sort of exuberant enthusiasm into their war programs. This competition provides them with free research and publicity - they don't have to spend a single dime to turn hundreds, perhaps thousands of fertile minds onto the old problem: How to kill.

    -konstant
  • SRL [srl.org] has been doing this kind of stuff for years. I was fortunate to catch their Seattle show in the late 80's. Truly awesome: diesel pulse jet flame throwing carnival clown, 20 foot tall tesla coil, a robot that moved around by screwing giant auger bits horizontally against the ground...
  • .. is LIVE-ACTION STARCRAFT!

    Wonder if having mega-units or "buildings" that churn out smaller units are allowed.


    I need more time away from my computer...

  • Re:Weapons of choice? (Score:3)

    by cswiii ( 11061 ) on Tuesday August 17, 1999 @10:09AM (#1742010)
    Rules can be found on this page [zdnet.com].

  • In the UK we've had this kind of stuff for years - as a TV programme [robotwars.co.uk] produced by the BBC [bbc.co.uk]!

  • I'd like to see a robot with two arms or something having stripped wires on the end. Then connect the wires to enough 9 volts so that when they come in contact with the other robot, it'd just fry it's board.
  • Check the contest rules: Section 11, "Weapon Types". So, no flamethrower "bots", lasers (of > 5mW), untethered projectiles (although -- the rules would seem to imply harpoons are allowed...).

    Hmmmm. This would have been far, far spiffier if they were actually autonomous, rather than large, armed remote-control vehicles.

  • Re:First! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is funny... someone moderate it up please.
  • I saw a SRL show at a SF pier a couple years ago. One of the machines was so loud it blew about 1/2 the windows out of the building. SRL rules!
  • I believe it was Patton who said, "You don't win wars by dying for your country. You win wars by making the other dumb bastard die for his country."

    Finding technology that will make the other dumb bastard die for his country sounds like a good idea to me.

    ----
    Wind and temp at my house [halcyon.com]

  • Electricity's not allowed as a weapon, sorry.

    Neat idea, though.

  • This is cool and all, but these are radio-controlled toys. It'd be ever so much cooler if they were really self-controlled.

    --

  • I thought the giant baloon was collecting anti-matter?
    Yep.... :) Is antimatter against the rules?
    char *sig =
  • Maybe I can finally make my robot with the suicide
    device... (MIT 2.670 contest organizers frowned on
    that idea)

  • Re:Weapons of choice? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No liquids, electricity, heat, or radio waves. Magnets appear to be ok. Somebody actually had a halon jet they used against opponents with internal combustion engines. :)
  • Sorry to squash such a great message, but under the "material" rules it says you cannot use materials that by nature pose a hazard to the creators or other contenstants (so no anti-matter from the balloon either).

  • Hmmm. You're allowed to pin/hold another bot for up to 30 seconds, so if one could grab/impale (i.e. figure out how to drive a long metal spike or two -- hydraulic press? blasting cartridges? The cartridges themselves aren't being used as weapons...) through the other bot. Or, alternately, drilling instead of spiking...
  • Of course, the other dumb bastards don't want to die for their country either. So they either a) develop similar tech (even if they have to steal it from us), taking us to a new arms race; or b) resort to the threat of "terrorism" (yeah, like there's a form of warfare that's not based on terror?) to discourage us from using high technology against them.

    (In other words, if you're threatening me with a weapon I'm either going to get one myself or I'm going to fight you in as absolutely dirty a manner as I know how.)

    I'd like to point out that there's always the radical idea of spending less resources on finding ways to kill each other and more on figuring out ways to build a just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

  • Case in point. Robocop, was great, 2 was a disapointment (I liked the scripted ending much better than the one they ended up using, in which the drug canister they give RC2 is actually a bomb), and I didn't bother to see RC3.

    That scene in RC1 where the prototype ED209 spatters some suit was classic. Revenge of the techies.

  • Re:A real competition (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I competed in FIRST '98 (Ladder Logic) and would have competed in Robot Wars '98 if it occured.

    The two are very different competitions.

    FIRST's primary goal is to get high school students interested in science and technology (FIRST = For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). Students are paired with local engineers (my HS paired with Lockheed Martin) and given a kit of materials with which to build a robot. Very few other materials can be used. The construction is very controlled and there are quite a few regulations regarding what can and cannot be done (limits on what gauge wire can be used where, etc., got very old very quickly). But the regulations are for safety, and to keep those who don't know any better from designing something that will quickly fail.

    BattleBots/Robot Wars/whatever is more for closet engineers (or realy ones...), not high school students, to have some fun. There are very few limitations, and one can use whatever materials they can afford. Granted, one can sink $10,000 into a robot, but this doesn't guarantee anything. One needs a good design, not a large square block of titanium, to win a match.

    In conclusion: they're very different creatures.

    --
    chahast at pangaea dot dhs dot org

  • YOU, TOO, can get in on this exciting new field in the privacy of your own home! Download RealTimeBattle [lysator.liu.se] and begin programming your own software robots for battle!

    There's a competition scheduled for September 11, so start writing an entry! Compete for bragging rights and proof and language advocacy!

    or, maybe not... I'm writing an entry in Haskell, the ultimate language... you might as well not bother. :-)
    (just kidding)
  • I started building one like that, once, but It gets hard and expensive real fast.
  • If you're in Tenessee, you might be able to get to DragonCon [dragoncon.org] for Robot Battles. This year's was the best we've had so far. Although I was a little disappointed that our robot, Stingray, didn't fare better.
  • I'd like to point out that there's always the radical idea of spending less resources on finding ways to kill each other and more on figuring out ways to build a just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

    If we did that, we'd run out of things to pick up the economy, take the attention of the press and the people off the corrupt government, and lose all our common enemies until we all collapsed from internal strife. In other words, we'd get so bored we'd turn on ourselves. I'd prefer a nice little cold war any day.
  • SRL [srl.org] is cool (I've seen them many times) but the thing they are sorely lacking is a sense of pacing. They build these really cool machines, but watching their shows, the experience one mostly has is monotony. It's not unusual to spend half an hour in the middle of the show wondering whether the show is over now, before some machine starts tearing some new machine apart.

    Sadly, the SFPD seem to be on SRL's mailing lists these days, so they don't get away with much any more. For the last few years, the Fire Marshall has tended to show up before the show has even gotten underway.

    If you like SRL [srl.org], you might also like Seemen [seemen.org]: here's an announcement for one of their recent shows: news:344de302.1085384@news.concentric.net [deja.com].

    Some like-minded links are over at Laughing Squid [laughingsquid.com].

  • Here's a thought...

    Have a machine that intentionaly 'mounts' the other one, clamps on (magnetic or barbed) and then proceeds to drill or cut the one below. You'd have to hit something vital to it's operation sooner or later and hopefully this would bring the maker to tears. (I hate it when something I do gets broken).

    As for outlawing weapons, my first choice was gas axe (oxy-acetelene) - banned, then ultra high voltage - banned, then... Oh bugger it. If you can't be really destructive, what's the point?
  • That scene in RC1 where the prototype ED209 spatters some suit was classic. Revenge of the techies.

    Not really. It wasn't "revenge of the techies"--it was "revenge of the bugs in a badly-run project". It was simply fortunate that it wasn't one of the techies that got snuffed due to bad code.

    Of course, they don't tell you how many devs and QA guys got turned into red mist during the dev cycle... :-)
  • If you can figure out how to make a building that churns out smaller units like that, you could make a killing making and selling the things, and probabl would be too busy making money to participate in a contest like this.
  • other then mash :) showed a similar event..
    I ran across the url once but didn't write it down.

  • Re:ECM? (Score:1)

    by Surt ( 22457 )
    In the detailed rules, there's a section
    restricting things like EMP and shining
    lasers into the eyes of your (human) opponents.
  • Get a grip.

    Why should the military care about some enthusiasts creating armour-plated remote control cars with pickaxes, hydraulic rams, spikes and aerosol flamethrowers as weapons?

    The next genius of Weapons of mass destruction? I don't think so. The next genuius of NASA rovers maybe.

    There's a stunning career waiting for you as a conspiracy theorist.

    - SparkyUK.

  • Old stuff (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    Not only have robot wars been around a long time, they're not even the coolest robotic systems going. Remote-controlled, indeed!!!

    From the micromouse, to robot table-tennis, through to robot soccer, there are plenty of robot tournaments that require the robot to have a basic AI system and be capable of making it's own decisions without outside intervention.

    How can some human-operated hammer compare to aware (albeit in a limited sense) robots, capable of playing competitions under their own brainpower?

  • Now hold on, I don't think the military had anything to do with planning this competition, but if you don't think they're interested then I'm not the one who's deluded.

    What better way to counteract ground troops than a phalanx of flame-throwing, machine-gun mounted, automated tanklets?

    And unless NASA is interested in a way to "flip" or roast chunks of inoffensive sandstone, I don't think they'll be getting much out of this.

    -konstant

  • SI (Score:2)

    by Pasc ( 59 )
    I hope they're using those SI prefixes correctly.

    If not, maybe be call them kibobot, mebobot, and gibobot. You don't wanna confuse people, right?

  • dorks (Score:4)

    by jackmott ( 71631 ) on Tuesday August 17, 1999 @10:40AM (#1742050) Homepage
    "eh, weve had this in the BBC for years, this isnt news"

    "I played with robots BEFORE they were cool, these are just posers"

    "We did this in my preschool with blindfolds on"

    SHUT UP!
    fighting robots is cool.
  • (otherwise there would have been a lawsuit between them that was dropped later)

    This was the first battlebots (of many?)
    i was there
    it was cool except their scheduling for the session i was was pretty inaccurate
    it started at 3 and went for '4-5 hours'.

    however when me and my gf left at 9:30 (to get her home by ten) it wasn't done yet
  • i remember seeing this competition years ago. Wish I could be involved with it.

    The funniest bot I remember seeing was this kids doll on a big wheel. It moved around and everything..
  • The BBC is really great at things like that, they have some cool people. Top Gear (offtopic) is another of my favorites. Fortunately the BBC can be received in most of Holland...
  • After the announcement last week shouldn't the categories be: KibiBot, MebiBot, and GibiBot?
  • The military isn't interested in some glorified lawnmower warrior. They've already got far far more destructive weapons.
  • ...just harder to make. Microcontrollers are cheap, and if they wanted to use bigger brains, they could just hook up their remote controls to their comptuters.

  • ECM? (Score:1)

    by Viv ( 54519 )
    Ahem, as I was going to say... looking at the rules, I don't see anything prohibiting ECM. Most of the robots seem to be controlled by a hobbyist radio control type thing -- I'm suprised nobody has put a radio jammer or something in their robots -- imobilize the enemy by jamming their controller, then tear them up with an axe/rotary saw, whatever.
  • Heh. Hmmmm. So, for safety and sanity reasons, something innocuous perhaps -- Nerf toys? Hmmm. Suction-based devices? Adhesive strips?

    Or, autonomous bumper cars (i.e. "weapons" being solid construction, speed, armor), which would be a tad less dangerous than a seg fault with an articulated arm ending in a chainsaw...

    I thought 'bout Laser Tag, but that wouldn't be nearly as much fun.
  • This competition is really cool, but the only problem is having to see your robot get destroyed after all of the work you put into it :-(. I guess the solution to that is to just win! Of course, that was Clinton's solution too and look where it got him ;-).
  • ...is, I WANT TO PLAY!

    Anyone in the middle tennessee area want to get a design going for next year? I have mechanical engineering ability and some metalworking skills, but lack any r/c expertise, ee, or robotics outside of r/c aircraft. I'm in Tullahoma, halfway between nashville and chattanooga... email if...

  • No, your robot only get's destroyed if it sucks and is not worthy of being around any longer...

    You have to make mighty robot warriors, like voltron.. ;) Use aluminum, steel, titanium, and nasty war implements to destroy the other robots. This is a test of the truest nature.

  • SRL is nothing like BattleBots. SRL borders on machanical performance art - there is far less structure to their events (Not to mention they are consisntaly in throes with the local Fire Dept. authorities.) BattleBots is a tournament with rules, regulations, and while I certainly don't find it all that facinating, and I know similar events have been going on for years, I'd have a hard time saying that it was SRL that pioneered this stuff.

  • they didn't ban explosives, adhesives, cattle prods, and electrical shocks. Anyone know of a less restricted tournament?
  • Those things are really cool. I wonder if there are websites for people who have no experience with electronics or robotics to start. I guess taking a few classes on electronics and circuitry would help :)

    But man, i'd love to make a few of those...

  • Hmm...nothing about Nuclear cremation. A few $mil in plutonium, a neutron gun, a deflective sheild and lead body suits, and voila, suddenly your the only one left (if your left, that is).

    Maybe you could hijack that satelite with the giant ballon when it flys by earth tonight.

    That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
    JM
    Big Brother is watching, vote Libertarian!!
  • During the session i went to, it was about 60/40 incapacitations/otherwise decided.

    Some of the bots were just not really capable of being incapacitated.... especially the all steel exterior ones w/ wheels theat went on both sides.

    however when they did get incapacitated, it was usually pretty impressive.

    if there are any videos of 'Ziggo' in action, check those out, that was a pretty sweet bot.


  • Right now all the robots are remote controlled. There should be a category for autonomous AI robots. The controller would have only three buttons: attack, move, and stop. This would lead to less emphasis on big blades and harpoons and more on nimble robots that could outsmart their competition. Of course this would require considerably more expertise and more complex rules, since you could probably confuse such a robot pretty easily.

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