Servo - September 2015

Who’s the Best Robot?

The most important thing to remember is that BattleBots is a single-elimination tournament with one champion. In addition to the Giant Nut trophy, the winning team received a $60,500 cash prize. For this first season on ABC, veteran robot teams from the United States and the United Kingdom were invited to submit design applications for a 250 pound fighting robot. Twenty-four teams were chosen as competitors, with six more alternate teams selected to ensure a complete event with 27 fights.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

The second most important thing to remember about BattleBots is that it is entertainment that must survive on network television. In the past, the game was “spinner, flipper, wedge.” The most pejorative phrase you could utter about someone’s robot was that it’s a “boring wedge,” and there were a few fights between slow moving wedge-bots that were painful to watch. The fact remained that the easiest way to beat a powerful spinner was to use a low angled wedge to deflect its energy.

Figure 1 shows three archetypal robots from the

2015 BattleBots event. At the left is Captain Shrederator, a full-body spinner with the largest rotating mass in the tournament. At the upper right is Bronco, the most powerful flipper at the event. At the lower right is Stinger the Killer Bee, a “wedgy” lifter which knocked out Shrederator and, in turn, was knocked out by Bronco. Bronco was done in by another spinner. To increase the audience appeal for this new show on ABC, BattleBots instituted an active weapon requirement, to wit:

The first obvious effect of this rule is to increase the number of spinners; over half of the initial field of

24 had a spinning weapon. The less obvious effect is to reduce the number of flippers. Only two robots had lifting weapons with sufficient velocity to launch an opponent off the ground. That left eight robots that are best described as lifting wedges or clamping lifters, and a few with flamethrowers for added excitement.

Missed Opportunity

One of the most exciting robots I had hoped to see fight was Beta from the United Kingdom. Beta is a hammer-bot, with a very heavy metal cylinder that comes down with enough force to lift the body of the robot completely off the ground. Every robot that goes into the BattleBox should be built to withstand blows from the “pulverizers” — driver-controlled hammers in each corner of the arena. A hammer bot must be very powerful to be effective, and in testing, Beta hit much harder than the pulverizers.

Unfortunately, on the trans-Atlantic flight from England to San Francisco, CA the airline lost the bag containing their

Over the course of three days, two dozen robots came together to fight for BattleBots’ coveted Giant Nut. Now that the tournament is over, let’s take a closer look at some of the details of how the event was run.