The History of
Rob t Combat
Robot Battles at Dragon*Con
● by Morgan Berry
Robot Battles at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, GA is one of the
oldest robot combat events. In
1991 (for perspective, that's the
same year that the World Wide
Web was launched), a few years
after the Denver Mad Scientists
Society created Critter Crunch at
MileHiCon in Denver (as discussed
in the first History of Robot
Combat article in the January
2012 issue), Kelly Lockhart was
inspired to create a combat
competition of his own. He used
Critter Crunch as his model and
hosted a simple event which soon
became a mainstay of the robot
combat world.
Lockhart was kind enough to
tell the story of the early Robot
Battle events:
"The genesis of Robot Battles
started in Denver, CO back in
1987 when a group of
engineering types created the
'Denver Mad Scientists Society'
and staged a small robotics-oriented competition at a local
science fiction convention. The
'Critter Crunch' event caught on
(and is still going strong to this
day), and word spread of the cool
new idea.
FIGURES 1 and 2. In these shots of the rumble at the end of Robot Battles at Dragon*Con last year,
you can see the raised platform arena that is unique to Robot Battles.
38 SERVO 10.2012
