Go big or go home.
Posted on 01/11/2014 7:30:19 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
Blame the wedges!
Robot battling was poised to become a true sport of the future. It had all the right elements: mad science, gladiatorial combat, plucky garage inventors, and televised action. So what killed it? A brutally effective, utterly simple machine called the wedge bot.
The wedge-style bot killed robot wars because it was invincible, which in the end made it boring. Yesterday SB Nation published a fascinating full history of BattleBots, which is a great, though giant, read.
But the mechanical evil that is the wedge bot deserves special attention. Competitions originally focused on robots using arms and blades and blunt objects to bash and slash and break each other apart. Wedge Bots had one simple, cunning attack: slide a wedge under another robot, flip it onto its back, and watch it flail about like a dying cockroach. Here is the timeline of how it managed to make killer robot duels boring.
1994 An exhibition and competition of garage-built robot warriors begins in San Francisco. Wedge bots are mercifully absent.
1995 The wedge bot premiers! Compared with its blade-swinging, hammer-bashing competitors, it is a unique and clever alternative. No one knew what to make of it. It won handily, with speed and novelty making up for its admittedly dull design. Watch the death of the sport below:
February 1998 BBC creates a "Robot Wars" TV show that lasts for five years. Wedges are a constant presence.
August 2000 Televised robot competition "BattleBots" starts airing on Comedy Central. By the time the show ended in 2002, "robot Darwinism," the term coined by battling robot pioneer Pete Abrahamson, has left the field with only three major robot archetypes: 1. Lifters, which had wedged sides and could use forklift-like prongs to flip pure wedges. 2. Spinners, which were smooth, circular wedges with blades on their bottom side for disabling and breaking lifters. 3. Pure wedges, which could still flip spinners.
What should have been an exciting, diverse sport is stuck at rock paper scissors.
February 2013 Noting the design dead-end created by "BattleBots" constraints on weight, size, and power, SyFy channel show "Robot Fighting League" premiers, with an important, wedge-proof requirement: all robots must be bipedal.
Not only does "Robot Fighting League" ban wedge robots, but all of the machines are created by the same designer. If robot Darwinism made the game boring, maybe robot intelligent design can keep it intresting.
I was fat dumb and happy watching Battlebots until they inexplicably ( to me ) canceled it. I don’t think it was a technical issue. Just the usual ratings game.
Go big or go home.
There you go.
Yes, 50 cal machine guns and rockets.
I remember watching a documentary about a robot battle (the first?) at MIT. It was called King of The Hill. All students had the same parts to work with. There was a hill with two opposing slopes. The winner was “Whoever got the highest up the slope. It was a hoot. They followed a few kids around as they made their robots. They had the competition. Most of the kids tried to build fast robots to get to the top first. Some built tall robots. One kid built a killer robot. The look on the other kids faces when he knocked their robots off the hill was priceless. It taught them to listen carefully and to anticipate what others might do.
#3 The robots should be allowed to join a union.
I so loved those shows.
They need to totally bring this back with a drone category.
I enjoyed it as well.
Exactly! Now there’s a battle bot fight I want to see.
LOVED LOVED LOVED all those shows !
Long live Vlad the impaler !
make it an outdoor sport, allow flying robots
Great idea! Let ‘em carry Hellfire’s too!!
“Razer” huh?
That’s nothing!
Here’s the REAL champion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25zh2Z0Z3JA
Nobody beats MiniFridge!
A lot of the success of the wedge is due to the (at the time) impracticalness of fast walker bots. You can’t tip a 6-leg bot if all you can do is lift one foot. Now that walkers are more feasible, it might be possible to bring back Battlebots. As others mention, varying the arena terrain would also negate a lot of the wedge’s effectiveness. Processing power is also a lot more substantial now, which would make self-righting bots more possible. A bot with a suspension system and the positioning sensors from a smartphone might be able to stay balanced without the need for a really complex controller.
Precisely, hard flat arenas produced a winning design. Change that surface and that design is no longer a winner.
That would be awesome
Vlad had to be one of the top three most effective and famous bots on that show. Good choice!
Yup, the sphere was my preferred design. Something that would roll without external protrusions (very heavy controlled counterweight inside), with powered spikes to snap out & in for damage. Wedge would do nothing, while the weight and spikes tear it up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.