So I watched this “BattleBot” thing tonight on pay-per-view.
It’s a pretty cool spectator sport, I think. “Vlad the Impaler”, a wedge-shaped forklift about the size of a cocker spaniel, won the world championship in a decision over “Voltec”, a smaller, snowplow-ish creation with a crane arm. Lots of unusual robots getting defeated throughout the quarter- and semi- final process. Poor gambling potential; every robot I thought would win got shoved around and cut apart.
Way neato - and I hope it comes to my town because I’d love to go see one of these 10-12 match spectacles in person. (Sparks and noise and robots getting flipped over etc., with circular saws and spikes periodically rising out of the floor of the ring to impale the contestants … ) Hell, if I knew anything at all about mechanics I’d be working on my own fightin’ robot right now.
I saw a commercial for it. It might be cool to watch if it were free, but I can’t imagine shelling out twenty or thirty bucks to watch a bunch of robots run into each other until one gets knocked over. Now maybe if they were outfitted with sawed off shot guns…
I saw a little blurb on the Discovery Channel a few years back on a similar robot contest. The robots were all self-running, no remote controls (was that the rule in this most recent contest?). They had to stay within a large white ring. Last bot in the ring won.
The winner for a number of years was a little guy called The Beast. It looked like a cigar box with a broad wedge on the front. It was built low to the ground, with no visible wheels, so that it couldn’t be easily grabbed or flipped over. It also had an extremely powerful motor.
The Beast used an optic sensor to patrol the edge of the white ring. When it detected something in front of it, the motor went into overdrive. The wedge would slide under the offending bot, wrecking its balance, and it would get shoved out of competition. Simple yet crafty design.
I watched it last night on pay per view, too. I’d LOVE to build one of those someday! I was pretty surprised to see Mechadon get defeated, as his builder has been doing those for a while- my hubby saw his “Master” bot a few years back at the World Science Ficton Con in San Francisco.
For more stuff about the bots, see: http://battlebots.com/home.html
It should be on PPV tonight too for anyone that missed it (and that isn’t watching the Super Bowl).
Prairie Rose
If you’re not part of the solution you’re just scumming up the bottom of the beaker.
The American version of this has been going on for some time now. Here’s the link: www.robotwars.com
My favorite of the robots so far was ‘blendo’. This was a robot that had a large metal colander studded with spikes spinning at very high speed. If any robot got close, the thing would just start to shred it. Unfortunately, they were disqualified after it was ruled that the thing might be a safety hazard to the audience.
I’d love it if these things became great pay-per-view events, because with money involved you’ll see a lot of backyard inventors working on robotics, and we might get some new technology out of it.
“Robot Wars” has been on British TV for some time now. I see it occasionally before heading out on a Friday night, and my favourite so far was this robot with a horizontall-mounted grinder disk that chewed up anything if came near. The house robots with the chainsaws and flamethrowers are entertaining enough.
I would SO watch that! I saw a commercial for it, thought, Hell Yeah, and forgot entirely about it. But I would sit through a whole one of those for damn sure.
Up to 486.
I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.
Robot wars has been around since '92 or so. First started in a college as a kind of simple game, grew pretty fast. The first wars were based off of the old ‘who can put the ball in the hole fastest’ games, which degenerated into ‘I’ll knock you out first, then put in the ball’ and then into ‘I’ll just kill you’. Took about 3 years I believe. The first major competition I remember about was back in 95 or 96 and was held at a national robotics contest. (The wars were only part of what was going on, the other parts included robots that had to find a person in a room, find an empty room, and then inform said person which room it was. Within 20 minutes or so, I believe.)
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
Prairie, IIRC, Mechadon didn’t actually lose. But, it had to forfeit its semi-final match, because the owners couldn’t get it repaired in time. Apparently it had taken a lot of damage in its previous match. Pretty disappointing too, Mechadon was definitely one of the most intimidating bots on the show!!!
Yeah, I hope it kicks ass, I had to have my brother tape it for me.
There are several ways to make it more interesting though:
Eqip the robots with more interesting weapons, and lots of them. If the robots had blenders and flame throwers and cattle-prods and ferrets and chain-saws and sticks of dynamite and pictures of my mother-in-law bristling off of them, the matches would be a lot more interesting.
Randomly throw live animals into the ring. Preferably big and juicy ones like llamas and fat sows. They should be drugged so they are floppy and thrown upside down so they flail around alot.
Randomly throw live grenades into the ring. This would liven things up a bit, no?
Randomly throw audience members into the ring, preferably from ejector seats controlled by majority vote.
**[disclaimer]I am joking. Please, if you are one those people who likes to bitch about everything, leave me alone If you are an animal rights activist, leave me alone If you find anything I said offensive, please, realize that it is a j-o-k-e and not meant to harm anyone. But if you must, go ahead and take me to the pit, just e-mail me and let me know that I need to go and defend myself. Noonch.[/disclaimer]
Fat Guy in a Little Coat,
SDMB Self-Righteous Clique
Mechadon sure was scary looking but he looked like he couldn’t really do that much damage. He needs a drill or something.
In fact, that’s one thing that may act to the sport’s (and it IS a sport) disadvantage, is the successful robots tend to be very mininmalistic in appearance, boxy … the ones with whirling saw blades and 2’ thrashing steel claws etc. all get knocked over pretty quick.
If you are an animal rights activist, leave me alone