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Robot Wars Coming Stateside
aaronhaley writes "Reuters is reporting
that Vicom will be bringing Robot wars stateside to air on several of their networks. Let's hope it's closer to the real thing that BattleBots is." And lets hope they keep the sportscaster crap to a minimum, and give us more mechanical bits.
Check your local listings!
I don't deny the appeal of watching robots fight each other, but why hasn't the genre progressed beyond that?
There are many constructive tasks that robots could compete at, but instead, producers turn out endless streams of robot battle shows. Maybe the audience demand isn't there, but I haven't even seen a more constructive show tried.
Perhaps I'm expecting too much from television, but the potential in robotics is amazing and it's a shame that isn't demonstrated more in these shows.
"The night is long that never finds the day." -- William Shakespeare
> The company intends to adapt the existing U.K. series for American audiences and will also produce a U.S. version.
does this mean I'm going to have to listen to Joe Nameth argue with Howie Long (or whatever the hell their names are) and make comments like "now what they really need to do to win the game is score some points"? maybe I'll pass.
seanYes, the announcers/sportscasters on Battlebots are annoying. But we have to be reminded sometimes: the whole world isn't the slashdot crowd. Comedy Central/Battlebots/Everyone else involved has to try to appeal to a larger audience, including those people who watch sports with human athletes. I love the techie bits too, but I think Battlebots has a good mix - It could be all talk. At least Battlebots occasionally goes "behind the scenes" to highlight some of the robots. If everyone in the key demographics were /. readers and MIT grads, it wouldn't be an issue. But the real world has people who wanna hear silly anouncers and see things beat eachother, regardless of what the tech specifics.
The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else.
The 20th century was a century of many things, not least of which was the advancement of robotics. Once battery power became truly feasible on a portable basis, and once machining was perfected on a small enough scale, robots emerged as a dominant mechanism of accomplishing what people either didn't want to do or were not well suited to doing.
There is lots of criticism based on how robotics is demeaning to working class humans, pushing them out of dull but well-paying factory jobs. But far too long overlooked is the plight of the robots themselves.
Most robots don't live the cushy lifestyles their celebrity brethren in Hollywood live. (Bender's cocaine and lubejob habits are well documented, for example.) Most are consigned to living in substandard conditions that we wouldn't inflict on even animals. They give of their sweat and toil until their parts wear out, upon which they are tossed onto the trash heap like soiled tissue or crunchy socks. Robots deserve better.
But at least we can justify such casualties as "necessary" for the advancement of the arts of production and development. How can we possibly justify the glorious outlays of money and robot chattel for mere gladiatorial combat? If you cut robots, do they not grease?
Our culture is descending into a tailspin of debauchery and gluttony where we laugh as sentient robots careen across our screens and disembowel themselves for our amusement. The mighty empire of Rome once stood where we stand, and their defeat at the hands of the Germanic barbarians is well documented. If we do not turn from this dark path, then we might too look down the barrel of a Swiss rifle and say, "Pass the popcorn, you're blocking my view of the set."
And lets hope they keep the sportscaster crap to a minimum, and give us more mechanical bits
Those sportscaster guys are half the fun of the show. Have you never watched Sportscenter on ESPN? The announcers on Battlebots are a great parody of the Sportscenter guys -- that whole thing is obviously toung-in-cheek and it's funny!
-Steve
...Robosport!
Sponsored by: Killum Weapon Systems!
...am I the only one who remembers this old Maxis gem? =)
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Oh man. Does this mean we will have a Kids Battle Bots, a generation X battlebots, and a "Super football like coverage" Bottlebots?
Yes, the losers go home in several storage crates, after the flames have been put out that is. Four large "house robots" see to it that any wussy behaviour, hesitation, or 'bot failure is rewarded by, say, being impaled on a robot-wielded drill, grilled over a flame pit, hoisted overhead for all to see and finally dumped into The Pit Of Oblivion in a cloud of smoke.
The taking of prisoners is not permitted.
Vik :v)
Am I the only one that is a little sick of the remote controlled battle bots, admit it, it would be interesting to see a couple fully autonomous bots going at it, completely independent of any external control. Heck 99% of the fun would be trying to build one of these.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
It's a fun show, better than battlebots in at least these ways:
--
see shy jo
What technology? 'tis just fancy remote control. I think the truth is that we are afraid to make real killer robots!
The competitors themselves are very much restricted in weapons design, resulting in very wimpy 'bots that seldom do any real damage.
We need the challenges of Robot Wars with the design rules of Battlebots.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
i greatly prefer battlebots to robotwars for a myriad of reasons.
:\ ).
first being, watching a robot go thru an obstacle course is very, very boring.
second, the 'house robots' on robotwars have an unreasonable advantage, and don't present the same degree of opposition to all contestants. (i.e. it seems that some people get a much harder wallop than others.) and they do actual serious destruction to competitors robots, which stifles innovation (why would i want to invest a great deal of money/time into a robot if their much-too-favored 'house robot' snips and blowtorches and spikes the hell out of it?)
i think the head to head competition as seen in battlebots is the best combination of testing the builders' mechanical prowess AND driving abilities, with just enough arena obstacle to keep them on their toes. it's challenging a driver (or team) to be on both offense and defense simultaneously, while needing to be keenly aware of their environment (to avoid the arena hazards).
the robotwars 'courses' leave hardly enough room to maneuver, and by the time one gets themselves pointed in the right direction, there's already one or several hulking 'house robots' there waiting to take your creation to bits.
that's just my $0.02. oh, and the announcer on robotwars is so annoying i sometimes consider avoiding the program because of him alone. (too bad TLC seems to have found someone even MORE annoying for robotica
www.pixelectric.com
Anything else you could have robots do would be nowhere near as cool as having them fight. Need proof?
Bob the Angry Flower - The Inner Light
Check it out.
---
4-star general in a one-man army.
Now what's your problem with Lister?
I just saw on TechTV, Robot Sumo Wrestling. These are actual robots, constructed from the ground up to push the opponent out of a ring.
The sample robot I saw is the current American champion, it runs on assembler code, which is placed on the machine via an RJ-45 port (I'm not sure if it's ethernet or an RS-232 adapter).
The robots are so powerful, a full-sized man could not push the American champion out of the ring (this was Martin Sargent, a bit skinny, but still a full-sized man). This is achieved (at least in this particular robot) through the use of a vacuum pump, which sucks the robot to smooth flooring. When it needs to move, it rolls along on rubber treads.
I watched Battlebots once, but couldn't stand it. Part of it was the general pointlessness, and part of it was the fact that I couldn't stop thinking of WCW/WWF wrestling.
What we really need is a telecast of the Robot Sumo Wrestling.
A new year calls for a new signature.
This is something you can't get EVERY week in a television show. It takes a really long time. And when you make something that good, you don't want to just wreck it. Its an academic achievement, after all.
Real robotics just isn't that exciting. Being a member of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems at my college, we're making something that moves on its own and records and responds to Video...THAT'S IT. Its actually not far behind the times, and ahead of the industry as it is.
Its just not a lot of fun to watch remote control cars move around...
Of course, you could just build sophistocated remote control cars and CALL it robotics...or BattleBots.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The allure of robot wars/battle bots/whatever is not watching them maneuver or negotiate obstacles; it's seeing machines get mashed! Just like with Motor Racing, there is an unwritten rule; audiences will pay to see destruction!
The truth of the matter is that most competitor-built robots are pretty useless and inflict little damage on others robots, therefore, to up the 'destruction quota' Robot Wars has 'House Robots' that will beat up on any robot that breaks or ventures into the wrong area of the arena!
Also, I read a post by someone who thinks watching autonomous robots fight would be fun.
[BZZZT] Wrong.
Having actually built several autonomous robots I can tell you that it would be the most BORING program ever to grace the beloved CRT. why?
1. The sheer difficulty in building a machine that can drive itself is staggering! Car engineers have tried this for decades without success.
2. Once you've got it to maneuver, how does the damn thing know where the opposition are? let alone where the walls and obstacles are! How do you tell the difference between robots and obstacles? Mind-bogglingly difficult.
3. Assuming you got your robot to do the above, you then actually have to have a reasonably destructive weapon in order to win! and use it correctly! How do you test this? You cant just turn on this autonomous, chainsaw weilding maniac in your living room!!!
At the end of all this, you'd have a program that involved lots of huge, hideously complex machines mercilessly attacking the walls, floors, etc. A highlight would be when one actually drove in a straight line before deciding that an object in the distance was actually an enemy and proceeding to kill thin air. Admittedly it might be interesting for Software people to try and analyze the logic beneath their behavior, but for Joe Shmoe it'd be dull, dull, dull.
Asimov would not be impressed.
Jan.
>Having watched Robot Wars quite a lot afterall,
(>it's hosted by Lister off Red Dwarf)
That would be Craig Charles.
Robot Wars is much much better than Battle Bots.
We get Battle Bots here in the UK (forget which channel).
I watched it once, and thought it was rather rubbish.
The robots were no better than some from Robot Wars, too.
-- And let there be light... so he fluffed the light spell
One person I know of is currently working on his Battlebot right now, and the basis for it is going to be a heavily modified Linux Router Project disk, using CompactFlash for the "disk", one of the Linux BIOS projects for boot, and a couple of wireless LAN cards for controls. He's keeping a radio in it for backup, but I'm betting that Battlebots won't ever be the same again.
Not to mention the fact that there's a lot more tech in the R/C and Ham Radio worlds than most purely computer geeks want to give them credit for.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
The irony is that when the program first started; to try out the format; the program makers asked a few brits to make some robots and then played them off against the robots from the American Battlebots program.
The Americans slaughtered the UK bots.
Looks like the shoe might be on the other foot now though.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"'Robot' is the Czech word for slave. Introduced in the film 'Metropolis'.
Karel Capek (diacritics missing) in theater play "Rossum's Universal Robots". From Czech for "work".
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This is, indeed, a problem. We were working on the design of a weapon which would inject a two-part, structural chemical foam into other robots to burst them apart, but this is banned by the rules. So is enough flame to do any damage to anything, so are untethered projectiles, so is even water (again, we thought injecting salt water into an opponent could do quite interesting things to its electrics...).
But the most irritating rule of all is that if you do any damage to the house robots, you have to pay for it! I thought Hypno-Disk was being very wussy last year in not attacking the house 'bots, but having read that I understand why. For those who haven't seen it, Hypno-Disk does not send it's opponents home in packing cases. If they can find bits big enough to fit in a shoe box, they're lucky.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
SuperID
Free Database Hosting
I have competed in RobotWars UK for the last 3 years, and have enjoyed most of my time building and competing with other robot builders.
However the production company are quite mean. We fought on a Monday, won our first round battles, and then were told to go home for 3 days until the semi finals. Its not like we were expecting 4 Star accomodation or anything, a B&B would do. The production company wouldn't pay our travel expenses either, and award no prize to the winner other than a small trophy (that has been made by another competitor in the past, as they were too cheap to make one themselves).
As most of you probably know robotwars is different to battlebots. In battlebots if there is a KO the battle stops, everyine goes away with their machine mostly intact. Whereas in RW if your robot is disabled, the house robots come in and beat the crap out of your robot, which weighs less than half what the house robots weigh.
Now the production company are going to film a US robot wars, heres some details from an email received by a US robot builder:-
**Stop Press ** Stop Press ** Stop Press ** Stop Press ** Stop Press **
THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO BE ON ROBOT WARS!
The US ROBOT WARS CHAMPIONSHIP
will take place from June 27 to July 1, 2001 in London, England.
Winners will automatically qualify for the
2001 ROBOT WARS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
to be held on July 1, 2001 in central London
with prize money totaling over $50,000.
The qualifying process for the US Championship will take place throughout the United States over the next few months.
All teams who qualify will be flown to the United Kingdom to take part in the mechanized mother of all wars being recorded exclusively for American Network TV.
We will supply...
* All freight and international flight arrangements. *
* All international travel and hotel costs. *
* A $2000 appearance fee per qualifying robot. *
If you want to be part of the original largest and fastest growing robotic sport in the world, please contact the US Robot Wars Headquarters immediately.
E-mail us NOW at robotwars@bandeira-ent.com.
**PLEASE NOTE**
Your robot MUST be built in accordance with the current
"US ROBOTWARS Rules & Regulations."
If you do not have a copy of these rules, please email us immediately.
It is essential that you build to these rules as they differ from others currently available.
Contact Details:
Email: robotwars@bandeira-ent.com
Web: www.robotwars.com
Technical Inquiries:
Derek: rwusa@delbotsfoxy.demon.co.uk
...Let the Wars begin
We havent even been told when we are required for filming!
I don't get it. On the early series of Robot Wars in Britain, various people (mainly some guy with a long beard) were introduced as being 'the champion of Robot Wars in the US', 'the founder of Robot Wars' and so on. This led me to think that the British Robot Wars was just an adaptation of an American show.
Then I heard some mumblings on Slashdot about how Robot Wars had died / sold out, the original creator had been crushed by the soulless TV networks, et cetera.
Now it seems that Robot Wars is being imported to America from the UK. But is it actually a re-import?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What you are looking for is called the RoboCup. It is a AI/Robotics research competition where teams of 6 robots (2 defenders, 2 forwards, a goalie and a coach - the last sounds a bit funny) compete against eachother in a game of soccer.
The goal is to beat the real world cup team by 2050.
There are like four leagues (including a sony abio league). I think the big catch is that each team has to deliver a paper on AI/Robotics, on top of designing 6 robots...
You say you want a revolution?
The obstacle courses were scrapped after the first few series of Robot Wars. That's when I stopped watching - endless robot battles with nothing else are a bit too monotonous.
The house robots are usually much tougher than the competing robots, but they don't have an 'advantage' because they are not part of the competition. Normally they act only when you go around the edge of the arena, or are pushed there. Myself I find the 'perimeter patrol zone' with Killalot and chums much more interesting than Battlebots' rather limp ramps and saws.
Craig Charles _is_ annoying, it's true; but he doesn't talk for very long (unlike the two Battlebots presenters). If you've been watching the first series, with Jeremy Clarkson, be happy that he gets replaced soon.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
But Millionaire was based on The $64000 Question.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm in the UK too. I love Robot Wars, its a very cool program with some real ingenoius designs. But Battlebots is just terrible. I couldn't watch more than 5 mintures before I had to turn the TV off. Its no wonder so many Americans want to go out and shoot each other, there's obviously sod all decent TV. Why not shoot those commentators. That I *would* like to see.
The first televised version of this was "Robot Wars" in the U.K. Their website mentions that "Robot Wars" is coming to the U.S. soon, but provides no further information. BTW, if you want to argue the merits of U.K. vs. U.S. robots, go to the message board at their site, the debate has been raging for months.
Battlebots is the first U.S. version, seen on Comedy Central in the U.S., The Comedy Channel in Canada, and BB2 in the U.K. Some of the robots from the British series appeared in Battlebots and did rather well. The rules and weight classes differ between the two shows. Battlebots info is here.
Finally, TLC, one of the Discovery channel networks has a series called "Robotica" which starts airing tonight at 9:00 PM E.S.T. It seems to be a hybrid of RobotWars and BattleBots, but there's not much information on the website.
Information about the robots can be found on the Robotwars and Battlebots websites, and many of the robots (or their builders) have their own sites, with more technical info than you can easy digest in one sitting. Take a look at the Suicidal Tendencies site and look at how they machined the individual tractor treads out of aluminium blocks. These people are fanatical!
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
The format of Battlebots is a parody of American sports (with two "s"es), pro wrestling in particular. As for the violence, I guess Brits would rather see the competitors get sliced and diced by the house robots than fight each other. And I guess you can't see any point to the driving skills needed in Battlebots, because after all, the Brits don't have NASCAR.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That's sick. It's obviously just a way to make sure that the house robots continue to look tougher than they really are. I hope somoene with deep pockets decides "what the heck" and takes one of them out sometime.
Rich
The word 'robot' was invented by a Czech playwrights Karel and Josef Capek and first appeared in Karel's 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). It is derived from the Czech word 'robota', which means "servitude, forced labor".
In the play, humanoid worker robots rise up and destroy their human masters.
Ironically, Josef died as a slave himself, in one of Hitler's concentration camp in 1945. Mercifully, his brother died before the war but not before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
here's the whole problem of Brits not getting most of the humor.
Ah! There was humour (with two u's)? Must have missed that. I just found it, well, loud and annoying. Read American.
crap is kept to a minimum - but I'm guessing that that's because the English are not very good at it
Woah there! More likely the "sportscaster crap" is not present in the BBC programme because it is cheesy, pointless, unconvincing and a general waste of time!!!
Hah!
Production problems in Battlebots:
This is a country that specializes in making uneventful, boring activities exciting on TV. Battlebots manages to make a very exciting premise boring and uneventful.
I can't wait for the survivor robots. Imagine, living only off of 12 mb of ram, running W2k pro, and multitasking!!
Nick Hancock? I don't think so.
:- Jonathon Pearce, a very shouty man who made his name commentating on football matches for Capital Radio.
For series 4 (just finished over here) the main presenter was Craig Charles, as has already been noted. He was assisted in the pits by Julia Peel, and the commentator was the same as it always has been
In previous seasons Phillippa Forrester was in the pits, and for the first season Jeremy Clarkson was the main presenter, but Nick Hancock's never had anything to do with the show.
In short: most cars in a junkyard will run fine. Most are gotten rid of when a part fails, the body rusts through or the car hits a tree and it's not worth fixing. Most junkyards pull the engines on the car since it's generally more valuable than the body: JW just leaves them in. There are a lot of other odd things you wouldn't expect to find there.
However, the yard is seeded with certain items that are required for safety or that couldn't be found or hacked up. Examples: the rocket motors and the steam boilers and engines. You can't get a profesionally built steam boiler certified in England in less than ten hours, much less a hack job.
Given some of the amazing bodge jobs I do see (cutting a propellor out of a chunk of wood with a chainsaw, or a 3000 RPM water pump made from a brake rotor and some welded on bits.) I'm willing to cut them slack
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Sounds like you are describing the V1 - with a little more size information, I would be able to tell you for sure, but it does sound like the V1, which was an actual pulse jet engine from a WWII German V1 "buzzbomb", but mounted on a radio controlled "cart". The thing is huge (15-20 feet long), with the business end around 3 feet in diameter - did it have a large engine on one end driving what appeared to be a blower? Did the flame shoot out many feet?
Just from your description - that sounds about right? It also sounds like you didn't have any ear protection. I went to the Phoenix show (96?) and even with ear-plugs, the sonic noise was deafening. It is surprising you managed to keep your hearing.
BTW - as far as pulsejets are concerned, they are not pleasant to be around. Last year a small demo was given by Pauline and Co. in a warehouse in South Phoenix (ChemLab), which I helped to set up - a demo of a small (but damn powerful) pulsejet that was going to be used on a hovercraft for a future show (which was supposed to be in Phoenix, but got nixed hardtime by the PFD - thanks, bastards!). Amazingly loud! Mark told us about doing some testing runs on another pulsejet, and being around it running for about 30 minutes. He said he stopped the engine, and felt tingly all over. Soon he felt real bad - basically his nerves (from the vibration waves) had become hyper-sensitive, where the slightest noise or touch caused great pain - he said it was like this for about a week. Not fun...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I really do like Battlebots, but maybe that's because I always fast forward through the commentators crap. PVR's and Battlebots are the perfect combo, you can watch a half hour episode in about 10 minutes.
I WOULD like to see a rumble, all the bots vs. the commentators. superheavyweight would be fun.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This is as opposed to Battlebots, where the sole challenge is to outlast or disable the opposing robot.
I've seen most of the Robot Wars episodes that PBS has shown over the last two years, and I don't recall any bot with real damaging weapons except the house robots. The rules forbidding hardened steel really cripple Robot Wars weaponry.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
OK, Brit and long-term Robot Wars fan here.
I _don't_ _like_ Hypnodisc.
Look at most of the robots and they win by incapacitating their opponents somehow or (occasionally) throwing them out of the arena. Hello, Chaos 2.
Hypnodisc, quite openly, set out to _destroy_ their competitors. Not just incapacitate so that it can't work without a few hours work but destroy. As a modelmaker (Meccano - Erector for the Americans here) and general creative person, I don't like the idea of deliberate, needless destruction of creative works.
Hypnodisc have, regularly, reduced their competitors to small parts. In the last series they even destroyed a few batteries. This after the other robot had been clearly defeated and stood no chance of recovery. Yes, I know the whole point is to defeat your opponents in battle, but this is little more than mutilating the corpse.
They are bullies, plain and simple, and I _wish_ they'd change the rules to allow the referees to stop a fight or penalise this form of action.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!