Servo - January 2014

Super Heavyweight flipping robot and I think the first to really violently flip the opponent. Few to none of the Super Heavies had a way to self-right or work upside down.

We lost, however, in an early round because of a loose radio battery, but came back in the melee to flip all the other robots in quick succession for the win.

This was our first real victory, with the entire crowd going nuts chanting "TORO, TORO." I will certainly never forget that. (Editor: The loss was to Atomic Wedgie.)

Combat Zone: How would you describe the participants during those mega TV sessions, versus the atmosphere we are all used to at the more builder-run events?

Rose: BattleBots was builder-run from the get-go. Trey (Roski) and Greg (Munson) were very builder-centric and tried as best they could to keep a level playing field that anyone could join. However, when we hit 500 entries or so, this made the early elimination rounds really brutal. These were not filmed for TV. In order to get to the TV rounds, you had to fight a lot of fights against unknown bots. This changed the competition to being a lot more about how fast you could repair your robot and get it back into fighting shape than any of the events before.

Towards the end when we were running four bots, we made our whole shop portable and put it in wheeled cabinets. This way, we could run our own pits out of a large rental truck in the parking lot where we had everything close at hand including things like TIG welding.

Combat Zone: Most memorable win? Biggest loss?

Rose: Our most memorable win for me was T-Minus vs. Hazard which was not only the middleweight champ, but it had never even lost a bout. Hazard's helicopter-like rotary blade weapon had absolutely destroyed every robot it came across.

We had to go against Hazard in the quarters or semis of the last season of BattleBots and we were pretty nervous. T-Minus had a powerful flipping arm, but we did not want Hazard to get close enough to hit us while we tried to flip it over. So, we went over to see it in the pits and while I chatted with Tony (Buchignani), Reason got a measurement of exactly how much reach his blade weapon had.

We then welded a small titanium tab onto our flipping arm that would stop Hazard from getting too close by jamming up against its bodywork. This turned out to work perfectly and as Hazard drove right into us, the weapon was just out of reach. We then flipped his own bodywork up into his weapon, causing catastrophic failure. We went on to get the middleweight championship title.

My most memorable loss was certainly the first year we brought our Heavyweight robot Matador. It had the most powerful flipping arm we had ever built, at 21,000 pounds of force. We were really confident in it and had a good amount of testing time on it. Unfortunately, however, it had exposed wheels and when we went up against a spinning weapon robot it had each of its wheels mowed off one by one for a pretty humiliating loss. (Editor: This was against M.O.E. at BattleBots 4.0.)

Combat Zone: Any advice for newbies wanting to get into the sport?

Rose: My advice for any sport — especially one that is technology driven — is to go in with a long term plan. Make the first entry just about getting there and competing. Just going to your first event, you will learn a lot about the whole sport. Then, aim to make the second entry at least competitive. By your third, you should be aiming to win. The last bit of advice is to get done early enough for lots of driving practice. Way too many bouts are lost due to poor driving because the event was one of the first times they drove it.

Combat Zone: What have you been up to since the end of the televised fighting era? Anything you'd like our readers to know about?

Rose: I’ve been working on building a monument scale 10,000 year clock with The Long Now Foundation ( http://longnow.org/) and Reason has started a new company called Universal Sonar Mount which makes a patented sonar mount for survey vessels (http:// universalsonarmount.com/). We still make some small robot kits that are sold through Robot Marketplace, as well as periodically do fun robotics projects like BarBot.