Servo - July 2012

The History of Rob t Combat: RoboGames

● by Morgan Berry

Note from the editor: Combat Zone declared 2012 “History Year,” and commissioned a young writer to produce an article series attempting to pick up where Brad Stone’s excellent book, “Gearheads” left off. This month, Morgan continues digging into the very raggedly documented history of our sport with this piece on RoboGames. In case you’ve missed other editions, she covered The Early Years in January, BattleBots in February, the post BattleBots transition in March, a comprehensive investigation into The Rise of the Ants in April, and Beetles last month.

PHOTO 1.

After the ending of BattleBots in 2003, a void was left in the world of robot combat competitions. A myriad of small competitions emerged to partially fill this void, but even with this flourishing of activity across the country, there was a noticeable absence caused by BattleBot’s end. While there were some national events, nothing as large or encompassing as BattleBots was quick to take root. Recently, this has changed.

While local competitions are still active across the country, they have been majorly scaled down and are less active than they once were in the early 2000s. In many ways, the robot combat portion of the festivities at RoboGames is the current answer to BattleBots. The largest robot combat event in the United States — and even the world — RoboGames has shifted robot combat back from a small grassroots movement to a centralized sport, much like it was during the BattleBots days.

If Sumo, soccer, and combat events were physically in the same place, the participants in these events could not help but collaborate with each other. In 2004, Calkins brought this vision to life and hosted the first RoboGames competition.

What’s in a Name?

After developing the idea, Calkins named his competition RobOlympics. Bringing together all of these different competitions in robotic sports and the inclusion of competitors from all over the world very much mimicked the human

The Beginning

It was not David Calkins’ — the founder of RoboGames — intention to create a successor to BattleBots. Calkins created RoboGames in order to foster collaboration between the different sectors of robotics enthusiasts. While participating in various kinds of robotics events, Calkins realized that roboticists tended to become extremely specialized in their particular area while ignoring all other areas. Combat enthusiasts stay in their circle, while the makers of Sumo bots (autonomous robots that use sensors to try and force the competitor out of a circular arena) also kept to themselves. The android enthusiasts, the robotic soccer programmers, and the makers of art bots also largely collaborated only with other builders from their own discipline.