And the rewards for winning a fight are mainly bragging rights. Most teams have more than $10,000 invested in their hardware, and some spend upwards of $30,000 or more. The bots that make the cut for televised bouts tend to be relatively sophisticated designs that aren’t exactly cheap to construct. Those types of weapons would have been totally impossible in the old BattleBot days.”
In some cases weapons such as flamethrowers have to be tested beforehand to make sure they can’t hurt the audience. Now we make teams fill out an application and a team of engineering safety experts must bless it before it’s allowed. We wanted the rules to be as simple as possible because we wanted people to be super creative. “We tried to think of every scenario we didn’t want and made it illegal. “In the early days of BattleBots, the rulebook was about 50 pages,” says Munson. The answer is a vetting process instituted by the BattleBot producers. So you might wonder what prevents a team from just mounting an AR-15 on wheels and sending it out to do battle. The rules of BattleBots dictate that every bot must have a weapon, but there are few formal restrictions on what constitutes a weapon. “Creativity and the engineering mindset takes over in the design of modern bots, distilling things down to their most pure forms that can survive and win a competition,” says Munson. Besides spinners, robot designs have evolved into wedges, lifters, and grapplers. Bot weapons now include not just horizontal full-body and bar spinners, but also disk spinners, both vertical and horizontal spinners, and even bots with multiple spinners. The current generation of battling robots evolved from these early efforts. Then Tony Buchignani built a robot called Hazard which had a bar spinner mounted on top like a helicopter.” Ziggo was a lightweight full-body spinner that did real damage to the other lightweights, it just turned them into scrap. “People saw that design and took a page out of the Blendo book. “Blendo was so dangerous that (Robot Wars creator) Marc Thorpe had to ban it from the competition because he didn’t have an arena strong enough to protect the audience,” says Munson. Powered by a lawnmower engine, blades attached to the shell tended to remove the bodywork of opponent robots and in some instances threw them over safety shields into the crowd. Called Blendo, it was a full-body kinetic energy spinner weapon with a shell made from a wok. One of the most successful bots from the 1990s was designed by Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters fame. They’ve also gotten more dangerous, thanks partly to the availability of battle spaces that are better funded. As the sport has evolved, designs have gotten more complex.” “It was a lot of fun but only the master designers were bringing competitive robots that could do real damage. “Back in the day, BattleBots was more of a science fair/art show/sculpture/nerd-fest event,” says BattleBots co-founder and producer Greg Munson.
Photo by Daniel Longmiregeneration of hardware is a far cry from earlier backyard-mechanic-style bots.
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