HISTORY REPORT:
Rob tic Competition,
Southern Style
● by Kelly Lockhart
There have been many articles
and books written over the
years trying to untangle the murky
pre-history of robotic combat in the
United States. Many people trace
the roots back to engineering
competitions at MIT, Cal Tech, and
other universities in the 1970s,
while others look to the San
Francisco, CA, performance artists
of the 1980s and their monstrous
mechanical creations. For most
enthusiasts, though, their first
exposure to the sport was in 1994
when Marc Thorpe organized the
first Robot Wars competitions in
San Francisco.
But Thorpe was far from being
the first. In fact, it was eight years
earlier in Denver that the seeds of
robotic combat were first sown.
An engineer by the name of Bill
Llewellyn got together with a group
of like-minded friends and formed
the “Denver Mad Scientists Society”
and organized a competition where
people constructed autonomous
robots to complete a simple race.
He called it the “Critter Crawl” and
it was met with great interest. As
Bill recalls, “Everyone came up to us
afterwards and said that as cool as
the event was, it would be so much
cooler if the robots actually fought
each other.”
So, in 1987, Bill and his mad
scientist cohorts developed a simple
set of rules for cable and R/C-controlled robots and launched the
very first “Critter Crunch” at the
MileHiCon science fiction convention. The event has been held at the
convention every year since, making
it easily the oldest and longest
running robotic combat event in the
world. But the story doesn’t end
there. In fact, it takes a strange —
and decidedly southern — twist
when in 1991, a disc jockey by the
name of Kelly Lockhart got a copy
of the rules and talked it over
with the then chairman of the
Dragon*Con science fiction
convention to see if they thought it
would be possible to stage a similar
event in Atlanta, GA.
They decided to go for it, had
the rules published in a convention
flyer, and then set aside a clear
space near the loading docks of the
Atlanta Hilton & Towers hotel for
the competitors that showed up to
fight. Two showed, and they fought
their robots against each other until
one could no longer function. Even
with just two robots, a crowd of
nearly 200 watched the action and
wanted to know how they could get
involved the next year. And thus,
“Robot Battles” was born.
The following year, the event
was moved to a ballroom with a
Sumo-style stage set-up (which is
used to this day) and an even-dozen
competitors showed up to compete
in front of an audience over twice
as large as the year before.
Intrigued by the response of both
Robot Battles and what Marc
Thorpe was doing out west in San
Francisco, in 1994 Thorpe was
invited to Dragon*Con to co-host
the event with Lockhart. While the
Robot Wars events were on a much
larger scale, Thorpe appreciated the
enthusiasm that the Robot Battles
competitors brought to the event.
So much so, that he returned to
Atlanta in 1995 to co-host the
competition for a second year.
In 1997, Robot Battles moved
from the Atlanta Hilton into a full
theater complex in the Atlanta
Apparel Mart, which coincided with
a dramatic increase in attendance
and participation. This can be
directly linked to the spread of the
Robot Wars publicity and several
television shows that took a direct
look at what Marc was doing in San
30 SERVO 03.2009
