400 Battle Bots Fight, Toss Enemies At RoboGames Competition 58
Andre writes "The 6th annual RoboGames were held in San Francisco last weekend. They welcomed a horde of 400 non-sentient, metallic warriors to do violent battle — against each other, of course. This army of remote-controlled and autonomous combat robots, along with walking humanoids, soccer 'bots, sumo 'bots and even androids that do kung-fu, was put to the test. Among the big winners was Canadian-made 'Ziggy' — one of the combatants in the 340-pound, super-heavyweight division (the biggest division) — who took home a gold medal for the fourth year in a row. The bionic brute proved its might against its final opponent, the 'Juggernaut,' by tossing it around like an empty pop can (and promptly making a mockery of its name) using a pneumatic flipper. Ziggy's newly-improved weapon results in unwanted (but totally cool) free-flying lessons for its opponents. At full power, the flipper can launch an opponent to the arena ceiling."
Hasta la vista (Score:2, Funny)
baby
Entertainment & Economic Woes (Score:2)
Battlebots at a bankers convention [popealien.com]
It may not do any good, but there's something to be said for entertainment value.
Best... Competition (Score:2)
The arena ceiling!? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The robots would fail after one or two hits. There was never really any massive destruction of the robots since when someone lost they wouldn't destroy the other robot out of respect or something.
Grant from Mythbusters, I think won the competition in the end, built a robot like the one in the videos from the article, would go really fast, slide under the compet
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadblow [wikipedia.org]
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It was boring because, like the UK Robot Wars, they made the program entirely wrong. Nobody cares about the teams back story. The commentators knew nothing about it and added nothing. In a half hour program there was about 5 minutes of actual robots fighting.
There was potential there. Some battles were entertaining. It's also not true to say that there was ever any massive destruction (in the UK one at least). The 'spinners' with 30kg+ flywheels occasionally totally annihilated an opponent. 'Razer' in the U
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I remember Mouser-Mecha-Catbot getting caught in the corner with the 200 pound sledge. Pounded _flat_ with the arena operator laughing maniacally, and the owner pounding on the arena to get his bot out. The match was done and there was a winner, but the carnage continued.
First rule of Robot Fight club (Score:4, Funny)
*pulls out a flash card*
Oh, ah no smoking.
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Shhh... We're not supposed to talk about it.
Flipbots = imba (Score:3, Informative)
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Lots of energy, noise, damage and spectacle and the teams were safely 300 metres away on a hill. theres no reason they cant do that here. just isolate the audience and get some decent weapons going on.
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Get DARPA (US Military) funding for this . . . (Score:2)
. . . why the hell not? They seem to be really interested in robot drones these days. And they already fund an "Robot SUV through the desert" challenge. The next phase should be robots, that can take out other robots. Maybe flip bots will prevail? Or maybe a Dalek-Thingie with a chainsaw will slice it in half first? Ok, The Doctor's K-9, armed with a Hellfire missle?
Only empirical evidence will tell us. Wake up DARPA! Get that checkbook out, real soon!
Now *that* would be entertainment.
Actually, n
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I'm not familiar with Battlebots on Comedy Central, but a couple of years ago, BBC 2 had a couple of seasons of Robot Wars, which was absolutely brilliant. It had flip bots which were indeed powerful, but also a lot of fun. Chaos 2 would often flip its opponent completely out of the arena. But flipping was by no means the only competitive weapon; Hypnodisk had a small blade on a heavy flywheel that literally tore its opponents apart. Great fun, and it did very well in the competition.
Shame they canceled it,
Flipbots are weak (Score:2)
I say don't ban flipbots.
Flipbots are weak, a team just needs to exploit the weakness. Look at Ziggy, after it flips you it's totally exposed.
What about an Enveloper bot that grabs the flipper as it is thrust underneath and uses the combination of the flip and its own mass to tear the flipper off?
What about a Foldbot that when you flip it, simply has half of it fold over the other half and use the action to drive a spike into the other bot?
That's a lot of energy the flipbots are giving away for free. Don'
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Completely agree with this in every way except a few issues. These competitions usually have weight restrictions and creating such a bot to combat the flipper genre is mighty hard to do without adding more weight or taking the place of more armor. Also, the complexity of the mechanism and the difficulty of pulling it all off during the competition makes me think that there should be some allowances given to bots that aren't of the flipper variety.
I would think that the competition should give advanced notic
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There're other types to fight before you happened to get to a flipbot. Maybe in a few years there'll be autonomous subsystems that control responses to things like flipping apparatus. You know, robot vision to track parts. You could have a camera onboard that feeds to the operators. It would track movement and the operator could assist in guiding its tracking by selecting paths with a stylus or something.
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I miss hypnodisc...first time I saw that beast go to work...damn! What a monster.
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Robot wars here in the UK had a few contenders for alternate paradigms - there was one particularly expensive and high-tech bot that had a stabbing axe that could punch through a respectable layer of armour. There was also one that had a spiked flywheel that debuted by tearing a schoolboy entry into tiny chunks.
Problem is, if you don't have something to right yourself after a flip, you may as well just throw in the towel on your first match against a flipping bot. There was an early episode, a previously-do
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Pretty soon, every decent robot had some sort of self-righting mechanism, though. You simply need one to compete. And people got pretty creative about self-righters too.
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What would stop the flipper from flipping the spikes up? The flipper doesn't have to get below the center of gravity, it just has to get below any part of the robot that's firmly attached to the rest. A spike will do, although the flipper has to be tough enough not to get pierced by the spike, I guess.
Arena ceiling? (Score:1)
im not fooled (Score:5, Funny)
Then later its with the running and the screaming and the shooting and buildings blowing up the time travel. Then its with the "Hello this is a final recorded message from john connor last of the humans"
Was Homer participating? (Score:2)
I won't spoil this but if you haven't seen the episode of the Simpson's where Bart is "helped" by Homer to compete in a robot competition you absolutely must. I think it was one of the funniest episodes EVER at least for us slashdotters. (Funnier even than the treehouse of horrors!).
Has anyone ever been caught "participating" in one of these events in the way Homer did?
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'bots? (Score:2, Insightful)
Remote control cars with armor and weapons strapped on actually.
I understand that the reason for the form factor in this environment, but please, let's be realistic about this. This isn't anything exciting from a tech perspective. Hell, I could have seen the -exact same- thing 9 years ago on the original battlebots. At least that had Bill Nye.
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ESPN....man.... (Score:3, Informative)
As someone who works in the ABC/ESPN hierarchy, and is also a big nerd, I was blown away when rumor was that ESPN was bringing back the BattleBots brand to television. Eventually it was official that ESPN was looking to display a robot fighting competition on ESPNU (the College brand for ESPN) and see how much interest there was in it. The competition was between College teams and wasn't nearly the production level of the BattleBots show that was on Comedy Central years before.
And unfortunately that all fell through...nothing ever came out of it. ESPN didn't show any robot competition on any of its branded stations (or even on the web at ESPN360).
BattleBots on Comedy Central was amazing back in the day. High end production values, commentary and color analysis, and of course machines killing each other. Live crowd reactions, story lines, personalities (of the drivers)....I can't believe ESPN missed this opportunity.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/03/11/064233/BattleBots-amp-ESPN-Strike-TV-Deal [slashdot.org]
http://www.battlebots.com/BattleBots.com/Events.html [battlebots.com]
I guess CBS Sports Online is going to put up footage eventually of the competition.
Either way I remember rooting for Bio-Hazard vs Vlad the Impaler as much as I root for Sox vs Yankees.
I wish stuff like this would make a comeback. Especially because it's a nice way to generate interest in science, robotics, mechanics, engineering, math, and critical thinking skills for children as well as highly entertaining.
Lastly YouTube proving it's worth for me once again:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Battlebotvideos [youtube.com]
I think you can figure out what kind of videos are on that channel...
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Either way I remember rooting for Bio-Hazard vs Vlad the Impaler as much as I root for Sox vs Yankees.
I didn't. Sox v Yankees involve teams you can't help but to take sides. Bio-Hazard vs Vlad was a better match because I was rooting for victory. No matter who took it in the end.
BattleBots sucked because they were not bots (Score:2)
Battlebots did indeed have production values, but I always hated the show because they were just fancy remote controlled cars.
I want to see real human crafted AI having to decide what is up in the arena with saws and flame and terrible liquids. I want spectators to be required to sit no less than a half-mile away behind protective screens - and also have to wear goggles and helmets.
Robot fighting could be really fun, if done right.
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> BattleBots on Comedy Central was amazing back in the day.
Yes, it certainly was "amazing". They took a 30 minute show which they could have filled start-to-finish with footage of RC vehicles beating the crap out of each other, and they added all the assorted filler junk like questionable"expert" analysis and commentary, talking head interviews, builder backgrounds, etc. Oh, and some random supermodel down in "the pit".
The end result was more like pro-wrestling than anything I could recognize as a scienc
Ignore the "battle bots". Check out the humanoids. (Score:5, Interesting)
The "battle bots" are mostly the usual stupid R/C "battery-motor-wheels" stuff. But some of the humanoid hobbyist robots on display are getting good. Dynamixel servos, which have useful feedback to the controller, are taking over. (They have a 1mb/sec polled serial link shared by all the servos. It's RS-485, which is 1970s technology, but that's progress over the usual one-way PWM interface.) The latest prototype Dynamixel servos can reach 500 degrees/sec, which means there's hope of making legged running work. Some of the humanoid robots have a 6DOF inertial unit, although balancing software is way below the Big Dog level and none of the humanoids had force-sensing feet.
The better hobbyist humanoids are almost at the hardware level at which Asimo/Big Dog performance becomes possible. The more advanced robot hobbyists now understand about ZMP. We're getting there.
For better coverage, see Robots-Dreams [robots-dreams.com], which also covers the Japanese hobbyist robot scene.
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Thanks for the link. Something like this [flickr.com] (or this [flickr.com]) is a lot more interesting (IMO) than the rolling wedge type of robot that's so common in this type of competition.
So... (Score:2)
...when the robots eventually take over and kill all humans, do you think this day will be remembered as sort of a Robot Memorial Day? Will it be marked like we mark 9/11 or 12/7?
'Remote-Control Autonomous' (Score:2)
Alright, what the hell does 'remote-control autonomous' even mean? I think we're getting scammed by calling it that. If it's just 'remote control', then I doubt very much it's what could be called 'robot'. Robotic, maybe, but otherwise it's just humans against humans.
"non-sentient" for now. This technology will lead (Score:1)
*not* 400, it was 63 - I was there (Score:3, Informative)
There were only ~63 battlebots there. The other robots were mostly autonomous, and were not involved in combat.
Flippers and Wedges (Score:2)
Boring (Score:2)
I've watched countless battles but I can't muster 1/10th of the enthusiasm some of these announcers seem to have. They're literally losing their mind when all the bots are doing is sitting there bumping in to each other. They desperately need to relax the rules on weapons. I assume this is why we don't see projectiles, explosives, electric shock, etc. As well as form factor. I can't imagine faced with all the flipper bots that someone hasn't just thought "Why don't I turn this guy into some kind of human st
MindRover: The Europa Project (Score:2)
I just wanted to take a moment to remember MindRover [cnet.com], a great game that never really got to see it's full potential.
For the uninformed, MindRover was a game where you'd build autonomous robots and program them for a wide range of events, ranging from races to combat. The programming was done through a process called "wiring", where you'd link your robot's physical components (sensors, motors, weapons, etc...) to logic circuits of varying complexity through flow charts.
(It sounds tedious, but it gets to be f
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